There are only two questions in business:
How to maximize returns, and how to minimize risk. Michael Raynor answers them both.


Highlights

Michael Raynor is one of the world's leading authorities on business strategy. He’s written two breakthrough books that together provide a complete guide to business strategy, solving both of its fundamental problems:

The Innovator's Solution shows companies how to maximize returns, while The Strategy Paradox shows them how to minimize risk.

In his most recent and timely work, Michael offers audiences the key to innovation in a recession. Recognizing how hard it is to kick the competition when they're down but you're down, too, he offers a 'new contrarian' strategy for gaining ground in a downturn: less for less.

'Less for less' allows you to keep innovating when it's hard to find money and you're tempted to cut prices to gain share—leveraging market conditions in your favor: trim back, but at the same time offer a modest but strategically chosen alternative that rides trends that the recession accelerate anyway.

Michael Raynor is the Deloitte Research Distinguished Fellow, and a key figure in Deloitte's global Strategy & Operations practice.

He is also an adjunct professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada where he teaches innovation, advanced strategy and executive education. Michael is a prize-winning essayist, including a McKinsey award-winning article in the Harvard Business Review.

An accomplished and experienced speaker with an engaging style, Michael delivers what clients routinely hail as the most mind-expanding yet practical presentations they have ever seen.

Less for Less—the key to innovation in a recession

Recessions tend to extinguish any attempt at meaningful innovation. The usual advice—the "old contrarianism"—advises you to kick your competition when they're down, and so many see the convulsions that surround today's market as a source of rare and valuable opportunities to take advantage of newly weakened competition. The problem is that in today's hostile economic environment it can be tough to steal a march because your organization is just as weakened. Here enters the "new contrarianism": finding ways to kick the competition when you're down, too.

The key is to offer "less for less." Take for example the telecom industry. Landline providers have been losing customers to wireless service for some time. In a recession, this trend will only accelerate. A "less for less" strategy would align itself with market realities: turn voice services from a core offering into a by-product of a much-improved infrastructure for video and data services. Going further, why not bundle wireless telephony with video service, amplifying rather than resisting the trend in order to gain better position in the video market.

The Strategy Paradox

Strategic planning demands accurate predictions of the future, even though such predictions are impossible. This leads to big bets that are either absolutely right or disastrously wrong. Most firms (often unwittingly) choose a timid, halting strategy instead, sacrificing any chance at greatness in exchange for mere survival.

But Michael knows the way out of this paradox, how to break the tradeoff between commitment and uncertainty to achieve results that have historically been reserved for the lucky few, while reducing levels of risk. Michael offers business leaders a concrete framework for strategic action at virtually every level of the organization that’s based on a wide range of disciplines and extensive original research.

The solution:

a new principle—Requisite Uncertainty
Design your organization so that managers at every level of the hierarchy understand the time horizon and degree of strategic uncertainty they deal with in order to make the right strategic choices.
a new management tool—Strategic Flexibility
The toolkit they can then use to create their strategic options.

The Innovator’s Solution

Now that you’ve tamed uncertainty, this worldwide bestseller describes how the most profitable and fastest-growing innovation opportunities lie in the most unlikely places: with your worst customers, or in markets that don't yet exist. Raynor can help your organization find and capitalize on the new growth businesses that are hidden in plain sight.

The Innovator’s Solution shows companies how to sustain growth, even after they’ve established their position in the market and find it increasingly harder to meet the demands of the market to continue growing. The odds are tough, but Michael has identified the forces that stand in the way and he offers new frameworks that can help business strategists create the conditions for their own disruptive innovations to succeed.

Deep Dive Management Workshops

Looking for a new and better way to engage your management team in group problem solving? Michael employs the proprietary DeepDive^TM method to transform the tired, boring "break out session" into a dynamic tool for generating innovative, yet actionable, ideas. Developed in conjunction with IDEO, the world-famous design firm, DeepDive^TM does for ideas what Edison did for industrial products.

Michael will work with you to develop a half to full-day workshop that will generate a level of involvement, enthusiasm and value that has to be experienced to be believed.

Credentials

• The Deloitte Research Distinguished Fellow
• Adjunct Professor, Ivey Business School, London, Canada
• Doctorate in Business Administration, Harvard Business School, Boston, USA
• Best-selling author and prize-winning essayist

Learn more about Michael Raynor at www.michaelraynor.com