Strategy Builder: How to create and communicate more effective strategies

RESOURCES AND CAPABILITIES

Purpose: Like the competitive advantage frameworks, those focused on resources and capability provide means by which internal strengths and weaknesses can be assessed. But here the focus is on strengths that emerge organically over time rather than positions that are designed or chosen by strategists in the present.

12. VRIO – Helps understand which of an organization's strengths could provide a sustained competitive advantage, and hence should be the primary basis of that organization's strategy.
13. Resource strengths/importance matrix (RSIM) – Identifies critical resources and capabilities that underpin an organization's competitive advantage.
14. Dynamic capabilities – Focuses the strategist on higher-order (and some would say most important) capabilities and strengths: those that enable a firm to learn, adapt and develop new capabilities for the future.
15. Design thinking – Encourages strategists and firms to develop the capability to think and act like good designers: thinking from the customer's experience, embracing constraints, prototyping and learning fast, and ‘abductive logic'.
16. 7-S framework – Evaluates how the elements that reflect an organization's culture might interact to enable or disable its strategic development. A good framework for examining how resources and capabilities can be aligned to reinforce one another.