Professor McGrath introduced the concept of arenas as a better way to understand competition than traditional “industries.”  She asked us to identify the key resources we are competing for.  They do describe our most significant customer segments in terms of behaviors, not demographics.  We identified the most significant “jobs” that each segment is trying to accomplish. From there, we had a basis to identify potential negative aspects of getting the job done, using a consumption chain map. Then we can start rethinking the “as is” state of our current business and begin to identify looming inflection points. A very useful exercise that generated a lot of engagement from seminar participants.

She introduced participants to early warning signals for strategic inflection points and ran an exercise using Waymo as an example.  She showed that as signal strength increases and the signs of a strategic change become clearer, your degrees of freedom to operate decrease correspondingly.  She helped us identify the optimal warning point, neither too soon, where signals are noisy, nor too late, where our strategic options are severely limited.  She showed us how to generate time-zero events and start working backwards.  She talked about healthy disengagement, deft resource allocation, innovation proficiency, discovery-driven leadership, and managing opportunity portfolios.