My research, which analysed 8,430 companies and 9.1 million words of annual reports across 20 years, found that the firms which achieved dominant profit share did so by organising their strategies around long-term external forces. Their competitors, facing the same forces with comparable resources, organised around internal priorities.

The more specific finding was about concentration. The dominant firms did not try to respond to every force in their environment. They emphasised an average of three to four external driver clusters significantly more than their competitors, and they sustained that emphasis across two decades. The small number turns out to be critical. Too many forces leads to diffusion, and what separated 11 firms out of 8,430 from everyone else was selecting the right few and committing to them.

But which forces? The research identified 292 individual drivers of transformation from a systematic review of the academic literature spanning four decades. I organised them into a four-level taxonomy, from individual drivers up through 32 clusters, 13 families, and finally five broad transformative forces. These five forces, Society, Power, Innovation, Nature, and Economy, form the SPINE framework.

These are not competitive forces in the Porter sense. They describe the categories of long-term structural change that operate above the level of any single industry, affecting all industries though not all equally. They are the territory from which strategic themes are drawn, and the convergence points between them are where the strongest competitive positions tend to emerge.

Society

Society reshapes markets through demographics, culture, and human development. Demographics are the slowest-moving and most predictable of all forces, which is precisely why they are so underused in strategic planning.

South Korea’s fertility rate fell to 0.72 children per woman in 2023, the lowest in the world and far below the 2.1 replacement rate. The working-age population has already begun to decline, and projections suggest the country will lose roughly a third of its current population by 2060. Japan, Italy, Spain, and much of Western Europe face the same structural trajectory at different speeds. For any firm that serves families with young children, this is a structural headwind that no product innovation can reverse. But the same demographic shift creates tailwinds elsewhere: eldercare, financial products for longer retirements, and single-person household services will all compound for decades. The same force creates both. The strategic question is which side of it you have chosen to build around.

Cultural shifts move faster. The expectations consumers bring to brands have changed materially over the past decade: transparency about sourcing, environmental commitments, and corporate values has shifted from a niche concern to a mainstream purchasing criterion, accelerated by social media platforms that give communities the tools to organise boycotts and coordinate switching behaviour. Fast fashion illustrates the convergence. Shein grew to become one of the world’s largest fashion retailers by offering extreme speed and extreme price, but its model has attracted sustained regulatory scrutiny in the EU and a consumer backlash from younger buyers who view disposable clothing as incompatible with their values. The strategic implications run in both directions: a firm positioned around sustainability faces a growing tailwind, whilst a firm positioned around volume and disposability faces a headwind that regulatory pressure is accelerating. A cultural shift that would have taken a decade to propagate in 1995 can propagate in two years today.

In the content analysis, this force showed up clearly. Unilever’s annual reports placed significantly higher emphasis on consumer culture and sustainability language than L’Oréal’s across the same 20-year period. Unilever was writing about the cultural forces reshaping personal care whilst its competitor wrote about product formulations and market share. The two companies were each describing their business, but only one was organised around the force that would determine who captured the majority of industry profits.

Power

The shift from a unipolar world to a multipolar one has transformed the operating environment for any firm with international reach. The US-China technology competition is the clearest example. Nvidia must simultaneously serve the Chinese market whilst complying with US export controls that restrict which chips can be sold there. Apple, Tesla, and dozens of other firms face versions of the same constraint. This is a structural realignment, not a trade dispute, and firms caught between the two blocs must now make strategic choices about which markets they can access and at what cost.

Regulatory nationalism reinforces this. Governments are increasingly using regulation as a competitive tool, imposing data localisation requirements, technology transfer conditions, and market access restrictions that fragment what was once a globalising economy. A firm that built its strategy around continued trade liberalisation is operating on a premise that has been weakening for a decade. The theme, stated with enough precision to be actionable, is “the shift toward regulatory nationalism.” Framed that way, a leadership team can allocate resources against it.

My data captured this in an unexpected way. Nokia’s annual reports devoted significantly more language to policy and regulation than Cisco’s over two decades of filings. Nokia oriented toward the rules governing its environment whilst Cisco oriented toward the market transitions reshaping it. The difference preceded the divergence in their profit trajectories by years, which suggests that how a firm relates to Power forces (as constraints to manage or as terrain to navigate) may be a leading indicator rather than a lagging one.

Innovation

The internet was a curiosity when I first encountered it in 1994. The idea that computational technology would create the most valuable companies in the history of capitalism was unthinkable at the time. But it happened, and the content analysis made this force visible with unusual clarity.

Apple’s emphasis on computational technologies was the clearest single signal distinguishing it from HP across 20 years of filings. Apple wrote about software, applications, devices, and systems. HP wrote about toner, laserjet, and printers. Same dictionary of technology language, radically different orientation toward where computing was heading.

Innovation extends well beyond computing. Infrastructure sets the conditions for further change: urbanisation, energy systems, and transport networks transform markets by changing how people live, where they work, and what goods and services can reach them. The continued redevelopment of major cities creates both opportunities and threats for incumbents and new entrants. New transport links, whether roads, railways, or shipping routes, reshape trade patterns and consumer access in ways that take years to materialise but create permanent structural shifts once they do.

Science delivers a different type of innovation from technology. Pharmaceutical breakthroughs, materials science advances, and biotechnology developments create cross-industry consequences that unfold over decades. The forces that reshape industries through innovation are structural rather than sudden, and what matters strategically is whether a firm treats innovation as a feature to add to existing products or as a structural force to organise around. The difference between the two is the difference between a product decision and a strategy.

Nature

Nature operates independently of markets. Climate change, extreme weather, resource depletion, and pollution are structural forces that reshape where people can live, what businesses can operate, and which supply chains survive.

The physical consequences are already measurable. Wildfires, flooding, and rising insurance costs are changing the economics of operating in geographies that were previously viable: major insurers have withdrawn entirely from the California homeowners’ market, and commercial property insurers are repricing risk globally. When the European energy crisis hit in 2022, firms that had treated energy as a background cost discovered it was their most pressing strategic concern. The underlying forces had been visible for years.

Nature also creates markets. Renewable energy, electric vehicles, sustainable agriculture, water management, carbon capture, and climate adaptation services are all industries that exist because of nature-driven change. Treating climate change only as a risk to be managed means seeing half of what is there. The threat and the opportunity are two sides of the same force, and the firms that organised around both early have built positions that late movers will struggle to replicate. Unilever’s decision to build its entire strategy around sustainability, launching the Sustainable Living Plan in 2010, was a bet on this force that competitors categorised as corporate social responsibility rather than competitive architecture. Gilead Sciences offers a less obvious example from the dataset: its annual reports emphasised globalisation and market expansion far more than Amgen’s, but its focus on computational technologies (unusual for a biotech firm) reflected a bet that data-driven drug discovery, sitting at the intersection of Innovation and Nature-driven health concerns, would become a structural advantage. It did.

Economy

The economy is the most familiar force and the one that firms already monitor most closely. Firms do not ignore economic forces. They treat them as background conditions to adjust for rather than structural changes to organise around, and that distinction matters.

A rise in interest rates triggers a review of the capital structure. Recessions trigger cost-cutting. These are responses, not strategies.

Economic forces become strategic themes when they pass the same tests as any other force: sustained structural growth, cross-industry relevance, and actionability. The rise of digital payment systems has been growing for over a decade and affects retail, financial services, logistics, healthcare, and government services simultaneously. A firm could organise its strategy around the shift from cash to digital payments and find applications across its entire portfolio. The growth of emerging-market middle classes, hundreds of millions of consumers entering the middle class for the first time across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, will reshape consumer goods, financial products, healthcare, education, and entertainment for decades. The shift toward subscription-based business models has restructured how value is created and captured across software, media, automotive, and increasingly physical goods. Each of these could anchor a firm’s strategy for a decade or more, which is fundamentally different from treating the economy as a set of conditions to react to quarterly.

Where the forces converge

The most powerful strategic themes sit where two or more forces overlap, and this is where the three-to-four-theme finding from my research becomes most practically useful.

Apple’s emphasis on computational technologies (Innovation) and consumer culture (Society) positioned it at a convergence that HP, focused on business markets and workforce management, missed entirely. Unilever’s emphasis on sustainability (Nature) and consumer behaviour (Society) placed it at a similar intersection. Tesla’s positioning combined electric vehicle technology (Innovation), tightening environmental regulation (Power), falling battery costs (Economy), and consumer preference for sustainable luxury (Society), creating strategic depth that competitors could not easily replicate because they would need to match Tesla across all four dimensions simultaneously.

The three-to-four number emerged from the data rather than from theory. Apple emphasised three driver clusters significantly above HP, and Cisco emphasised three above Nokia. Gilead, operating in a more evenly matched competitive pair, emphasised four above Amgen. Three or four themes is large enough to create a combination that competitors are unlikely to replicate, because it requires simultaneous commitment across multiple domains, yet small enough that the firm can sustain deep commitment across all of them over many years. A single theme creates vulnerability: if the force stalls, the firm has no fallback. More than four creates the same diffusion that conventional strategy produces when it tries to respond to everything.

Scanning a single force in isolation produces observations. Scanning for intersections between forces produces themes.

The practical exercise is to take each of the five forces, identify the drivers within it that are reshaping your industry, and look for the intersections: where do two or three forces overlap in ways that create a structural opportunity or threat?

The answer will differ by firm, even within the same industry. Two firms can pursue the same theme and still compete, because the way each converts the theme into products, processes, and operating decisions creates its own differentiation. But the firms that identify those intersections and commit to building around them over years are the ones that, historically, have captured the dominant share of their industry’s profits.

The SPINE framework is a map. What separates the firms that win from the firms that don’t is whether the forces shape the strategy or sit in a section of the strategy document labelled “external environment” and left there.

That distinction, between monitoring forces and organising around them, is where competitive outcomes are determined.

The pattern is familiar. The CEO presents the strategy to analysts. The same deck, lightly edited, goes to the leadership team. A condensed version reaches middle management at a town hall. By the time it arrives at the frontline, it has been stripped of everything that made it coherent. Ask a regional sales manager what the firm’s strategy is, and sometimes you will get a blank look.

The usual diagnosis is that the message needs to be simpler, or that leaders need to communicate more often. Both may be true. But the deeper problem is structural: there is one story, and it was written for one audience. Everyone else is receiving a translation of something that was never written for them.

Why one story fails

Each stakeholder group has unique needs. When a CEO describes “positioning around the shift to renewable energy,” every audience is asking a different question.

An employee is asking whether their role changes, whether they need new skills, and whether their job is secure. A shareholder wants to know the cost, the timeline for returns, and what happens if the transition takes longer than expected. Customers want to know whether this changes what you sell them. Suppliers are calculating whether they need to invest in new capabilities to keep the contract. And a regulator is asking whether you are getting ahead of compliance requirements and whether your experience could inform policy.

Same strategic logic. Five different concerns. One story cannot address all five without becoming so abstract it addresses none. And abstraction is exactly what happens. The strategy gets reduced to a tagline, something about “leading the transition” or “building for the future,” which is broad enough to apply to everyone and specific enough to motivate no one.

Same logic, different hero

The fix is to tell five stories built on the same strategic foundation, each framed around a different protagonist. The structural principle is straightforward: in a compelling narrative, the audience is the hero and the organisation is the guide. Each stakeholder group needs to see themselves as the central character navigating a challenge, with the firm’s strategy as the plan that helps them succeed. The strategic logic stays constant. The narrative frame shifts with the audience.

When a story works across all five audiences, it becomes a decision filter rather than a communication exercise. An employee facing a choice between two priorities can ask, “Which of these serves our strategy?” and answer it without escalating it. A sales team can explain to a prospect why the firm’s positioning differs from competitors. A board member can evaluate a proposed investment by testing whether it strengthens the firm’s position around its chosen forces. Narrative, done well, functions as infrastructure rather than an event.

This is easier to see with a concrete example. Take a mid-sized industrial firm that has selected three structural forces as its strategic themes: the shift toward automation in manufacturing, tightening environmental regulation, and the growing shortage of skilled technical labour. Those three forces are the strategic foundation. Every story is anchored to them. But each audience encounters them differently.

For employees, the story is about navigating change. The industry is transforming, and the skills that built their careers are evolving. The firm has identified where things are heading and is investing in retraining, new tools, and roles that will be more valuable as automation advances. The employee is the protagonist, adapting to a changing industry, and the firm provides a clear path forward. That path needs to be specific: these are the skills we are investing in, this is how your role will evolve, and this is what success looks like for you in three years. The alternative, left unstated but understood, is that firms which do not make this investment will see their best people leave for companies that do.

For shareholders, the same three forces produce a different story with a different structure. Start with the financial logic: automation reduces labour dependency and improves margins as skilled workers become harder to find. Environmental regulation is tightening, and firms that invest early in compliance avoid the cost penalties that will hit laggards. The shareholder needs to see today’s investments connected to compounding returns, with a concrete capital commitment, a timeline, and the logic linking external change to financial performance. Shareholders do not need to understand the retraining programme. They need to understand why the investment makes their position stronger as the forces accelerate.

For customers, the story shifts again. The same automation and environmental forces are reshaping the customer’s own operations. They need suppliers whose products and services are designed for the emerging world rather than the past. What makes this story different from the other two is the emphasis on alignment: the firm and the customer are exposed to the same structural forces, which creates a natural partnership. The customer has no use for the firm’s internal retraining details or its capital allocation plan. What matters to them is evidence that the firm is building toward the same future they are.

For suppliers, the concern is continuity and co-investment. A firm that is repositioning around automation and environmental regulation will need different things from its supply chain over the coming decade. The supplier story makes that direction transparent: here is where we are heading, here is what we will need from partners who can support that direction, and here is how growing alongside us creates opportunities for your business. Without this story, suppliers experience strategic change as a series of unexplained shifts in requirements. With it, they can invest in the capabilities that will make the partnership more valuable as the forces accelerate. The alternative for a supplier that does not adapt is straightforward: the firm will source from partners better positioned to meet its future needs.

For regulators, the story emphasises transparency and constructive engagement. The firm has identified specific structural forces and is getting ahead of compliance requirements rather than waiting for regulation to arrive. The regulator’s concern is balancing innovation with public protection, and a firm that can show its thinking, share its experience, and contribute to policy development is more valuable to a regulator than one that treats compliance as a reactive burden. The regulator story frames the firm as a constructive participant in shaping the rules that will govern its industry for the next decade.

Five stories. One strategic logic. The forces, the positioning, and the direction do not change between audiences. The hero, the problem, and the plan do.

What this looks like in practice

Satya Nadella’s repositioning of Microsoft after taking over as CEO in 2014 is one of the clearest examples of multi-audience strategic narrative executed well. The strategic logic was consistent: cloud computing was a structural force that would reshape enterprise technology, and Microsoft would organise around it. But the story Nadella told varied by audience. To employees, the message was cultural: a shift from “know-it-alls” to “learn-it-alls,” with a growth mindset replacing the defensive, Windows-centric identity of the Ballmer era. To investors, it was financial: a specific target of $20 billion in annualised cloud revenue by 2018, achieved nearly a year early. To customers and developers, it was about access: Microsoft products available on iOS, Android, and Linux, a move that would have been unthinkable under previous leadership. Each audience received a story built on the same strategic foundation but framed around their concerns. Microsoft’s market capitalisation grew from roughly $300 billion to over $3 trillion in the decade that followed.

The contrast with Nokia is instructive. When Stephen Elop arrived as Nokia’s CEO in 2010, his “burning platform” memo diagnosed the crisis entirely in internal terms: accountability failures, leadership gaps, poor collaboration. The memo was a single story, and it was written for one audience: the internal organisation. It gave shareholders no investment logic, gave customers no reason for confidence, and gave suppliers no visibility into where Nokia was heading. A crisis diagnosed in purely internal language provides no narrative that external stakeholders can act on. Three years later, Nokia sold its handset business to Microsoft for $7.2 billion, a fraction of the value it had held a decade earlier.

What goes wrong

The most dangerous failure is when the five stories contradict each other. The employee story promises that new skills will make their roles more valuable. The shareholder story promises that automation will reduce headcount by 20%. Both may reflect real elements of the strategy, but when employees read the investor presentation, and they will, the contradiction destroys trust faster than any amount of subsequent communication can rebuild it. The discipline required is to ensure that all five stories are internally consistent, which sometimes means accepting that a hard truth must appear in every version rather than being hidden from one audience and revealed to another.

Inside-out framing is the second failure. “We are building world-class capabilities in automation” is a statement about the firm. “Your operations are about to face a labour shortage that conventional hiring will not solve” is a statement about the customer. The second opens a conversation. The first closes one. Most strategy communication defaults to inside-out framing because it is easier to describe what you are doing than what your stakeholders are facing. The effort to reframe the stakeholder’s problem is precisely what makes the narrative useful.

Jargon kills stories faster than complexity does. “We are executing a synergistic, digital-first transformation” communicates nothing. Replace it with what is actually changing, for whom.

How to know whether it is working

The simplest test is comprehension. Select ten employees at random from different levels and functions and ask them to describe the firm’s strategy in their own words. If the answers are vague, inconsistent, or default to operational language (”we are trying to grow” or “we are focused on efficiency”), the story has not landed.

A harder test is whether stakeholder behaviour reflects the strategy. Are employees making decisions that serve the strategic themes without being told to, because they understand the logic well enough to apply it themselves? Are customers choosing you because of your positioning around the forces reshaping their market, or for legacy reasons that will erode? Are suppliers investing in capabilities that align with your direction because they understand where you are heading?

Strategy needs repetition to land. A CEO who presents the strategy once at a town hall and considers the job done will find that three months later the organisation has reverted to whatever it was doing before. The story needs to be told constantly, updated as conditions change, and reinforced through decisions that visibly connect to the themes. When a firm makes an acquisition, the leadership team should explain how it connects to the themes. When a team is restructured, the connection should be explicit.

The goal is narrative as infrastructure: the strategic logic providing the foundation, and the five stories making it operational across every audience the firm needs to move.

The implication is that change arrives as an event. Something happens, suddenly, and the firms that survive are the ones that react fastest. This framing has shaped two decades of strategic thinking and produced an entire vocabulary built around speed: agile transformation, pivots, fail fast. If disruption is an event, then the correct preparation is reflexes.

I think this framing is wrong. And I think it leads to a strategic mistake that most firms are currently making.

The forces were visible for years

The European energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is a useful place to start, because it is recent enough that most executives remember living through it. Energy prices doubled and tripled within months. Firms that had treated energy as a background cost discovered it was their most pressing strategic concern. The business press described it as a disruption.

But the underlying forces had been visible for years. European dependence on Russian gas was well documented. The fragility of concentrated energy supply chains had been discussed in policy circles for more than a decade. The accelerating economics of renewable alternatives were measurable in investment data and deployment figures. A firm that had selected energy transition as a strategic theme before 2022 was positioned to absorb the shock. A firm that had treated energy as a background condition was exposed by it. The difference lay in whether the firm had read the structural forces and organised around them in advance, not in how fast it reacted when the crisis arrived.

This pattern repeats across every major “disruption” story when you examine the timelines rather than the headlines.

The internet was a curiosity when I first used it in 1994, arriving at university to find an email account waiting for me. It took another decade before e-commerce reached a scale that meaningfully threatened physical retail. Amazon was founded in 1994 and did not turn a consistent annual profit until 2003. The retail industry had nearly ten years of visible, measurable signal before online commerce became a force that could no longer be treated as marginal. The firms that were eventually described as “disrupted by Amazon” had a decade to organise around digital commerce. Most used that decade to optimise their existing store estates.

Electric vehicles tell a similar story on a different timeline. Tesla delivered its first Roadster in 2008. The forces behind it, battery cost reduction, tightening environmental regulation, and shifting consumer preference toward sustainability, were visible years before any traditional automaker described itself as disrupted. Most automakers treated EVs as a regulatory compliance exercise well into the mid-2010s, a full decade after the underlying forces were measurable.

The sustainability movement that reshaped personal care took a generation to travel from niche activism to mainstream consumer expectation. Unilever organised its entire strategy around this force, launching the Sustainable Living Plan in 2010 and tying executive compensation to sustainability targets. Over the following decade, Unilever’s purpose-led brands (Dove, Hellmann’s, Seventh Generation) grew 69% faster than the rest of the portfolio and delivered 75% of the company’s growth. The strategy has faced legitimate scrutiny since, particularly around whether the sustainability premium is durable in a cost-of-living crisis and whether Unilever’s operational performance matched its strategic ambition. But the competitive positioning was real: while competitors categorised sustainability as corporate social responsibility, Unilever treated it as architecture. By the time the rest of the industry caught up, Unilever had spent years building capabilities and supply chains around a force that others had been merely monitoring.

None of these were surprises. They were structural forces that built over years, were measurable throughout, and reshaped industries through sustained, compounding pressure rather than a single event.

The difference between a force and a fad

If most industry-reshaping change is slow and structural, then the strategic skill becomes the ability to distinguish between forces that will compound over decades and fads that will spike and disappear, rather than speed of reaction.

This is harder than it sounds, because at any given moment the business press is full of both. In 2013, Google Glass generated enormous coverage and trend reports predicting that augmented reality would transform every industry within five years. It disappeared within two. Cloud computing, by contrast, had been growing consistently since the mid-2000s, across economic cycles. Google Glass was a fad, and cloud computing was a force, but in real time both received comparable media attention.

I use three tests to separate the two. A candidate force must pass all three to qualify as what I call a strategic theme.

Has it been growing for ten or more years at a rate significantly greater than GDP growth? This is a retrospective test, and deliberately so. It filters out temporary enthusiasm. Electric vehicles pass. Segway scooters, launched with extraordinary hype in 2001 and still a niche product two decades later, do not. Cloud computing was a structural change already underway and measurable. The metaverse, as conceived in 2021, was a prediction about what might happen. Strategy built around predictions is speculation. Strategy built around structural changes already in motion is positioning.

An obvious objection is that some forces appear to arrive fast. Large language models went from a research curiosity to a boardroom priority within two years of ChatGPT’s launch. But the ten-year test is about the underlying force, not the product that makes it visible. The computational infrastructure behind LLMs, GPU processing power, large-scale data, transformer architecture, and cloud computing capacity had been building for well over a decade. What arrived suddenly was public awareness, not the force itself. The firms best positioned to capitalise on generative AI in 2023 were the ones that had been investing in computational infrastructure and data capabilities since the early 2010s. The product was new, but the force behind it was not.

Does it affect multiple industries? A force that reshapes only a single niche is too narrow to anchor a firm’s strategy. Ageing populations pass this test decisively. They reshape healthcare, financial services, housing, consumer goods, labour markets, and the care economy simultaneously. A firm that organises around them can find applications across its entire portfolio and across multiple geographies. The test is designed to filter out forces that are real but strategically insufficient. Telemedicine, for instance, is a genuine structural shift that has been growing for over a decade. But it affects healthcare delivery and, at the margins, insurance and technology infrastructure. A pharmaceutical company or a health system could build around it. A diversified conglomerate could not. The multi-industry test ensures that a theme creates enough strategic surface area to justify organising a firm around it.

Can a firm explicitly allocate capital and talent to it? This is the test that most candidate forces fail. “The world is becoming more uncertain” is an observation, not a theme. No firm can build an R&D programme around uncertainty. Renewable energy, by contrast, leads to specific investments, specific acquisitions, specific hires, and measurable targets.

Most firms’ current AI strategies fail this test. “We are investing in AI” is not actionable in the way the framework requires. It does not specify which AI capabilities the firm is building, which business decisions those capabilities will change, or how capital is being allocated against measurable milestones. A passing version looks more like “We are investing in machine learning for drug discovery, with a dedicated team, a three-year capital commitment, and quarterly milestones tied to pipeline acceleration.” The difference is between acknowledging a force and organising around it, which is the difference between awareness and strategy.

The severity of requiring all three tests is deliberate. My research showed that the firms which dominated their industries selected three or four themes, not twenty. The small number is part of what makes the approach work.

What disruption gets wrong about preparation

The disruption framing leads to a specific type of preparation, and it is the wrong one.

If you believe change arrives as events, you invest in agility. You build rapid-response capabilities, innovation labs, and organisational structures designed to pivot quickly when something unexpected happens. The logic is defensive: we cannot predict what will hit us, so we must be ready to move fast when it does.

Understanding change as structural forces leads to a different set of investments. It starts with foresight, the ability to identify which forces are structural, which are accelerating, and which are actionable. From there it requires positioning, the deliberate decision to organise your strategy around a small number of those forces, and the discipline to hold that position across leadership changes, recessions, and competitive pressure. Structural forces reward firms that stay committed to them over decades.

The firms in my research that achieved dominant profit share did not get there through agility. They maintained their strategic orientation across 20 years, through the dot-com crash, the 2008 financial crisis, and multiple changes in competitive dynamics. Their annual reports in 2019 emphasised the same types of external forces as their annual reports in 2001. That consistency reflected conviction rather than rigidity, built on correctly reading which forces were structural and committing to them before the rest of the industry caught up.

A different question

The disruption narrative encourages a question that sounds strategic but produces anxiety rather than clarity: “What could disrupt my industry?”

The question invites speculation about unknowable events, rewarding imagination over analysis and producing long lists of potential threats that cannot be prioritised with confidence because the framing assumes that the defining characteristic of disruption is surprise.

A more productive question starts from the opposite assumption. Instead of asking what might arrive without warning, ask:

Which structural forces have been building in my industry for a decade or more, affect multiple industries, and can be acted on through specific investment and resource decisions?

The first question generates scenario planning. The second generates strategy.

The forces are there. They are measurable. In most industries, the forces that will reshape the competitive landscape over the next fifteen years are already visible in academic research, government policy, demographic data, and technology adoption curves. The firms that will be described as “disrupted” in 2040 are, in many cases, already sitting in industries where structural forces have been compounding for years. They have access to the same information as everyone else. The question is whether they will use it to optimise their current position or to organise around where the world is going.

That choice, not the speed of their reflexes, is what will determine the outcome.

All of it is directed at the same assumption: that the firm’s strategy needs to be better formulated or better executed.

I spent three years testing that assumption. I studied 8,430 companies, built a methodology to identify the 11 that achieved genuine profit dominance in their industries (just 0.13% of the sample), and then analysed 9.1 million words of annual reports across 20 years to understand what separated them from their competitors.

The finding was not what I expected. The losing firms were not badly managed or under-resourced. The gap between the winners and losers was not a gap in the quality of their strategies.

It was a gap in the direction of their attention.

Where the leadership team pointed its collective gaze, inward at operations or outward at the forces reshaping the world, determined who dominated their industry for decades. Both winners and losers operated in the same industries, had access to the same opportunities, and employed comparable people. They made different choices about what to pay attention to. That finding, if it holds, has significant implications for how we define strategy and what we ask leadership teams to do.

What attention actually looks like

Let’s analyse three of the 11 winning firms that had a dominant share of their industry’s profit pool, and compare them with the firms they beat.

Starting with Apple vs. HP. The statistical finding that Apple emphasised computational technologies significantly more than HP across 20 years of annual reports is accurate, but abstract. What it actually looked like at the level of individual words tells you far more about how attention operates.

Both Apple and HP wrote about computational technologies. Both companies were, after all, in the technology business. But the specific words were different, and the difference is revealing.

Apple’s annual reports used words like software, applications, devices, systems. HP’s used toner, laserjet, inkjet, printers, servers, desktops. Same topic. Same cluster of language about computing. One company was writing about where the industry was going. The other was writing about what it currently sold.

Apple also placed a significantly higher emphasis on consumer culture (music, marketing, advertising) at a time when it held just 1% of its industry’s profits. I’ll come back to that timing because it turns out to be a critical finding throughout the research.

The Cisco and Nokia comparison showed a different version of the same pattern. Cisco’s language focused on investments, competitors, markets, and contracts. Nokia’s focused on shares, debt, capital, compensation, employees, and benefit plans. Cisco was analysing the dynamics of its competitive environment whilst Nokia was administering its financial and organisational mechanics.

A third pair, Gilead Sciences against Amgen in biotechnology, confirmed the direction: Gilead oriented toward market expansion and global distribution, Amgen toward regulatory compliance and financial management.

There was also something revealing across the competitors as a group. Nokia, HP, and Amgen, despite operating in completely different industries, all placed disproportionate emphasis on the same types of inward-facing concerns: how they managed their people and how they structured their finances. The winning firms (Apple, Cisco, and Gilead) were not neglecting these. They simply organised their strategic narratives around something else.

A note on method

An obvious objection: annual reports are drafted by investor relations teams and reviewed by lawyers. They are not a CEO’s unfiltered thoughts. Why treat them as a proxy for strategic attention?

The objection is fair, but it misses what makes these documents useful as data. Precisely because annual reports are institutional products, reviewed and approved at the highest level over many years, they reflect the sustained priorities of the firm rather than the preferences of any single author. A CEO can say anything in an interview. What the company writes in a legal filing year after year, knowing the SEC will scrutinise it, reveals what the organisation collectively believes. The repetition across 20 years of filings is what gives the signal its weight. A single report could be noise. Two decades of consistent emphasis is institutional conviction.

I also examined a second source: the personal statements of CEOs in interviews and speeches they made during the period. In every pair, the institutional and personal voices pointed in the same direction.

John Chambers at Cisco framed his strategic logic around market transitions, business model changes, and technology shifts. When he described why Cisco was investing in a particular area, the justification was always a force in the environment rather than a gap to close against a competitor.

Stephen Elop’s “burning platform” memo at Nokia illustrates how the opposite works. (I explored this in more detail in a previous article.) Elop arrived at a company whose institutional narrative was already weighted toward financial management and internal operations. His diagnosis of the crisis was framed entirely in internal terms: accountability failures, leadership gaps, poor internal collaboration. The external forces that had destroyed Nokia’s position appeared only as things already lost to, not as forces the company could reorient around. A different CEO might have changed the direction. Elop reinforced it.

Attention becomes self-reinforcing inside an organisation through exactly this kind of loop. The CEO’s convictions shape the annual report, which shapes internal planning conversations, which shapes what gets funded. Over time, what gets funded determines what the organisation builds capability around, and that inherited capability base determines the starting position of the next CEO. The loop runs for years before anyone measures the consequences.

The negative space

What the winning firms chose not to emphasise matters as much as what they chose to foreground. None placed disproportionate emphasis on financial and economic systems, education and employment, or policy and regulation above their competitor’s level. These topics appeared in every filing, as they must. But they were background, not architecture.

The competitors were not oblivious to external forces. Technology appeared in HP’s reports. Consumer devices appeared in Nokia’s. The external forces were present in their documents, but presence is not organisation. Awareness means the force appears somewhere in your documents. Attention is different: it means the force organises your decisions. The gap between noticing something and building around it is where competitive outcomes are decided.

Why inward attention persists

If the evidence is this clear, then why do most firms default to looking inward?

Because inward attention is immediately productive. Cut costs, and the result appears in next quarter’s results. Restructure a division, and the org chart changes quickly. These are real accomplishments that produce visible progress against measurable targets.

Organising around long-term external forces offers none of this. The feedback cycle is measured in years. The connection between a strategic commitment and a financial outcome is indirect, contested, and impossible to isolate on a quarterly earnings call. A CEO who stands before a board and says, “We are reorganising our investment portfolio around three structural forces that I believe will reshape our industry over the next fifteen years,” is asking for patience that public markets are not designed to provide.

The result is an organisation that, from the inside, looks like it is executing well. Goals get set, roadmaps get built, and the leadership team achieves alignment around a set of priorities that are coherent, measurable, and pointed at the wrong thing. HP had three consecutive CEOs, Fiorina, Hurd, and Whitman, each running competent operational playbooks built around cost synergies, headcount reductions, and restructurings. The activity was real, but the direction was inward.

The attention trap works because execution against the wrong object is indistinguishable from good strategy in real time. The consequences only become visible years later, when the firm’s position reflects decisions made a decade ago. A CEO has a fixed number of hours in a week. A leadership team has a fixed number of agenda items it can meaningfully discuss in a quarter. Attention is zero-sum at the top of an organisation, and the superfirms allocated theirs differently.

Attention came first

The finding that matters most is about sequence.

The analysis I completed did not just show that superfirms paid more attention to external forces than their competitors. It showed that the attention preceded the dominance, in some cases by more than a decade.

Apple was writing about consumer culture (music, marketing, advertising, the relationship between technology and how people live) when it held 1% of its industry’s profits. This was before the iPhone and before iTunes reached any meaningful scale. In the early 2000s, when HP held 23% of the industry’s profits, and Apple was widely regarded as a niche computer maker with beautiful products and no market share, Apple’s strategic narrative was already organised around the forces that would determine the next twenty years.

The timing separates the attention finding from a simple retrospective explanation. If outward attention were a by-product of success, the practical implication would be zero. You cannot copy a by-product. But the sequence runs the other way. Apple oriented outward when it was small and unprofitable. The dominance emerged years later, as the forces Apple had been building around accelerated and its position strengthened with them. The same pattern appeared in Cisco and Gilead.

The research does have limitations worth acknowledging. Selecting firms based on profit dominance and looking backward creates survivorship bias: we see the firms that won, not the firms that oriented outward and still lost. It is also possible that the pattern reflects visionary founders (Jobs at Apple, Chambers at Cisco) rather than a mechanism any leadership team can replicate. The matched-pair design partially addresses both concerns, since the comparison firms started from positions of equal or greater strength and faced identical external forces. But analysis of six firms, however rigorous, identifies a pattern. It does not prove universal causation.

What it does suggest, with consistent evidence across three industries and two decades, is that attention precedes outcomes and may function as a driver rather than a description. If so, it is something a leadership team can deliberately redirect.

Applying the finding

I call the broader framework Thematic Strategy: the deliberate selection of a small number of long-term drivers of transformation as the organising themes for a firm’s strategy, where the themes become the anchor for every significant decision the firm takes.

The method is detailed elsewhere, but the diagnosis can start now. Five questions for a leadership team to audit where its attention is currently directed:

1. Of your five largest capital allocation decisions in the past two years, how many were triggered by an external force you had identified and committed to, versus an internal target or competitive reaction?

2. What are the three external forces your strategy is explicitly organised around? If the answer takes longer than ten seconds, you may not have them.

3. When your CEO describes the firm’s direction, does the language centre on the world outside the firm, or on the firm’s own operations, capabilities, and financial position?

4. What percentage of your last four board agendas was dedicated to discussing structural forces reshaping your industry over the next decade, versus operational and financial performance?

5. If you read your last three annual reports as a content analyst would, what story do the most frequently repeated words tell about where your organisation’s attention actually sits?

The answer to those questions is the real strategy. Everything else is aspiration.

Apple consistently achieves around 25% market share of the global smartphone market.

But its profit share? That’s a different story: 78%.

Apple accounts for 78% of all profits generated by the smartphone industry, despite having only a quarter of sales volume. This single statistic changed the way I think about business performance. It told me that the traditional measures of market leadership, whether revenue, unit sales, or market share, miss the point entirely. What matters is not how much you sell, but how much of the value you capture.

That insight became the seed of a three-year PhD research project at ESCP Business School. The question I kept returning to was deceptively simple:

What do companies that dominate their markets actually do differently from everyone else?

Decades of strategic management research have tried to answer this question through different lenses. Strategic foresight says it’s about scanning the environment and anticipating change. The resource-based view says it’s about building unique internal capabilities. Strategic positioning says it’s about finding the right place in the industry structure. Each offers part of the answer. None offers the whole picture.

Then I came across a paper from 1993 by Igor Ansoff and Patrick Sullivan that reframed the question entirely. Their argument was straightforward: there is no single success formula with universal validity. The profitability of a firm is optimised when its strategic behaviour is aligned with its environment.

This is the concept of the environment-driven firm. It doesn’t assume markets will keep growing. It continually monitors the external world for signs of demand saturation, technology substitution, social and political discontinuities. It assesses the future profitability and growth potential of its historic markets. It searches for new opportunities while divesting from unpromising ones. Most importantly, it treats the external environment as a moving reference point — a feedback loop that strategy must constantly adapt to.

What matters is not how strategy is derived, but how well it stays aligned with environmental realities over time.

This concept led me to structure my entire PhD around a single proposition:

Companies that align their strategies with external drivers of transformation can achieve market dominance.

Intuitively, it felt right. But I needed to prove it.

Three Papers, One Argument

To investigate this proposition, I needed to answer two questions in sequence before I could test anything.

First, what does market dominance actually mean, and how can it be measured? If I’m going to claim that certain firms achieve dominance, I need to define the term rigorously and identify which companies meet the threshold.

Second, what are the external drivers of transformation that firms are expected to align with? If alignment is the mechanism, I need a structured way to describe what firms are aligning with.

Only once those two foundations were in place could I test the central proposition: does strategic alignment with external drivers of transformation actually distinguish dominant firms from their peers?

I structured the research across three papers, each building on the last:

Paper 1: The Rise of the Superfirm. Defined market dominance, created a formula to measure it, and identified the firms that met the threshold.

Paper 2: Drivers of Transformation. Conducted a systematic literature review spanning four decades to map the complete landscape of external forces reshaping how firms compete.

Paper 3: Thematic Strategy — A Path to Market Dominance. Combined the prior insights by analysing 20 years of annual reports from six firms to test whether strategic alignment with external drivers distinguishes dominant firms from their competitors.

Each paper took roughly a year to complete. Each processed vast amounts of data. Together, they built a cumulative argument with each paper providing a necessary foundation for the next. Without a rigorous definition of dominance, I couldn’t identify which firms to study. Without a comprehensive framework of drivers, I couldn’t test alignment. Without the test, the proposition would remain an intuition rather than an evidence-based idea.

The Rise of the Superfirm

The first paper had a clear objective: define market dominance and find out whether it exists.

I started by rejecting the traditional measures. Revenue, sales volume, and unit market share; these tell you who sells the most, not who captures the most value. Over the long term, profit drives shareholder value. And shareholder value is what executive teams are ultimately rewarded for creating. So I defined market dominance as having a dominant share of an industry’s profit pool.

That raised a harder question: at what point does a company’s profit share become “dominant”? The threshold needs to be empirically grounded and applicable to any market. After extensive research, I found the answer in an unexpected place: antitrust law.

In 2008, Arie Melnik and colleagues published a formula for calculating the market share threshold at which dominance exists:

The formula compares the largest company in an industry with the second-largest. The key insight is that dominance increases as the gap between first and second widens. The formula produces a threshold that’s specific to each industry, so there’s no arbitrary fixed number.

I used GICS industries as ‘the market’ because the classification narrows companies to similar business activities. Companies within each industry are directly comparable, as they sell similar products and services and compete for similar customers. You could define industry differently, but the principle holds: it needs to represent a group of similar firms in genuine competition.

I applied this formula to the profit shares of companies across 81 GICS industries. The dataset covered 8,430 US-listed companies, and I used a five-year profit pool from 2015 to 2019 to avoid distortions from COVID and the 2008 financial crisis. Industries with fewer than ten companies were excluded to avoid structurally concentrated markets; I was looking for dominance earned through competition, not dominance by default.

Take Apple as an example. In that period, Apple’s share of profits in the Technology Hardware, Storage & Peripherals industry was 82%. The second-largest was Dell at 4%. Applying the dominance formula, the threshold for that industry came out at just 16%. Apple surpassed it by a wide margin.

Of the 8,430 companies analysed, just 11 met the conditions for market dominance. I called them Superfirms.

This was good news on two fronts. Market dominance exists. And it is extraordinarily rare.

With hindsight, this finding was fortunate. I had a notion of market dominance. I found a rigorous formula to test it. The result was a small, identifiable group of firms I could study further.

But identifying the Superfirms was only the beginning. The next question was how they achieved it. I developed four sequential propositions to frame the argument:

Proposition 1: Superfirm status requires a distinct competitive advantage that sets a company apart from its competitors.

Proposition 2: External drivers of transformation define and redefine competitive landscapes and alter the parameters of competitive advantage.

Proposition 3: Companies that align their strategy with external drivers of transformation are better positioned to proactively adapt and innovate, sustaining and enhancing their competitive advantage.

Proposition 4: Sustaining and enhancing competitive advantage leads companies towards Superfirm status.

The logic flows in sequence. You need a distinctive advantage. That advantage exists within an environment shaped by external forces. The firms that align with those forces can adapt and innovate. And that sustained adaptation is what leads to dominance.

But I couldn’t just state this as true. I had to prove it. And to prove it, I first needed to understand what those external drivers of transformation actually are.

Mapping the Forces of Transformation

I assumed a clear, widely accepted framework of external drivers of transformation already existed.

It didn’t.

Instead, the literature is fragmented. Terms like megatrends, disruptive innovation, creative destruction, and paradigm shifts are used inconsistently and often interchangeably. They point to real phenomena, but they lack shared definitions, a common unit of analysis, and an agreed structure.

This creates three problems. Conceptual ambiguity, where distinct forces get blurred together under loose labels. Analytical weakness, where drivers are studied in isolation without a framework showing how they relate to one another. And strategic failure, where leaders struggle to translate abstract change into concrete strategic choices.

The root cause is straightforward: there is no commonly used driver construct and no comprehensive framework spanning both concrete forces and more abstract systemic change.

That gap became the focus of my second research paper, and the most demanding part of my PhD. Where the first paper was quantitative and structured (data in, formula applied, results out), the second paper required me to read, absorb, and synthesise an enormous body of qualitative research across significantly different disciplines.

I used a systematic review of the global research literature to identify every driver of transformation discussed across economics, technology, policy, medicine, the environment, geopolitics, and social change. I built a precise search logic using a wide set of phrases that capture how transformation is described across different fields. I set strict selection rules: peer-reviewed work only, any time period, English language, and only articles where external change was the central focus.

I applied this process across two major research databases, Web of Science and EBSCO. The result was 1,234 serious research papers. More than 10 million words.

I read all 1,234 abstracts and assessed whether each paper was genuinely about drivers of transformation. Five minutes per abstract. Over 100 hours. Spread across four months, before work and at weekends. I have a mild form of dyslexia, which made the academic language especially hard going. That reduced the set to 171 papers. After filtering for journal quality and full-text access, and reading the remaining articles in full, I arrived at a core set of 88 papers representing the serious body of work on this topic.

I then used descriptive coding techniques to extract signal from noise. This requires reading every sentence carefully and, where it’s relevant to the research question, capturing a word or short phrase that assigns a summative attribute to it. The result was thousands of captured codes, from which I distilled 292 distinct drivers of transformation.

Interestingly, after about 60 articles, I had exhausted the findings. The remaining papers reinforced and refined what was already present but added no new drivers. That’s a strong signal that the review was comprehensive.

Now I had my answer to the first research question: what drivers of transformation are discussed in the academic literature? The harder question remained: how should these 292 drivers be organised into something leaders, researchers, and policymakers can actually use?

I organised the evidence into four analytical levels:

292 Drivers of Transformation. A driver affects humans and their environment. It can be concrete — electric vehicles, extreme weather, pollutants — or abstract: a pandemic, political ideology, the internet.

32 Driver Clusters. Related drivers that shape the same area of change are grouped together. Machine learning and autonomous vehicles sit within artificial intelligence and automation. Global warming and extreme weather are part of climate change.

13 Driver Families. Clusters operating in the same broad domain are grouped again. Artificial intelligence and internet technologies fall within computing and connectivity. Pollution and environmental degradation fall within environmental conditions.

5 Transformative Forces. At the highest level, the driver families aggregate into five fundamental forces shaping long-term transformation: Society, Power, Innovation, Nature, and Economy. Together, these form the SPINE framework.

• Society captures the broad forces that shape how humans collectively live and interact: population demographics, urbanisation, consumer culture, health and wellbeing.

• Power encompasses the forces that govern how authority and influence are distributed: geopolitics, governance, policy and regulation, conflict.

• Innovation covers the forces driving technological and scientific progress: computing, connectivity, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, new materials.

• Nature addresses the forces arising from the physical environment: climate change, pollution, resource depletion, biodiversity.

• Economy captures the forces shaping how value is created and exchanged: globalisation, trade, financial systems, business models.

I also conducted a sentiment analysis and a literature growth analysis. For each driver cluster, I assessed whether academic discourse framed its impact as positive, negative, or both. And I calculated the compound annual growth rate of publications for each cluster as a proxy for rising importance.

Combining these two signals produced the Growth-Impact Matrix: a 4x4 framework mapping driver clusters according to how fast they’re growing and whether their impact is positive or negative. The growth axis runs from baseline to exponential, reflecting how rapidly research attention is increasing. The impact axis runs from threat to opportunity, reflecting whether the academic discourse frames the driver’s effects as harmful or beneficial. This provides leaders with a way to identify which drivers are accelerating and whether they represent opportunities to pursue or threats to manage.

With this in place, I had two core inputs for testing the central proposition of my PhD: a definition and measure of market dominance, and a structured framework of the external drivers of transformation. The final paper brought them together.

Testing It: Twenty Years of Annual Reports

The third paper was the test. Do Superfirms align their strategies with external drivers of transformation more extensively than their direct competitors?

I needed a data source that would reveal strategic intent over a sustained period, be comparable across firms, and be publicly available. Annual reports (10-K and 20-F filings) met all three criteria. These documents require management to disclose strategic and operational information affecting the company’s performance and outlook. They’re rich in narrative about where the company is heading and why.

The design was built around matched pairs. I selected three Superfirms and paired each with a competitor from the same GICS industry that had held the leading share of industry profits during 2000 to 2004 but subsequently lost that position to the Superfirm. This gave me a direct comparison: two firms facing the same market conditions, the same competitive pressures, and the same external forces, but with very different outcomes over the following fifteen years.

Crucially, comparison companies were in the same GICS industry. This ensured they shared similar core activities, served comparable customer bases, faced the same macroeconomic trends and regulations, and competed for similar resources. Any difference in strategic narrative would therefore reflect genuine strategic choices, not structural differences in business context.

The three pairings were Apple vs Hewlett-Packard (HP), Cisco vs Nokia, and Gilead Sciences vs Amgen.

For each company, I analysed annual reports from 2000 to 2019, twenty years and 120 reports in total. The total text across all reports was 9.1 million words.

I used dictionary-based content analysis. For each of the 32 driver clusters in the SPINE framework, I created a dictionary of keywords derived from the full word list across all 120 reports. After extensive filtering (removing infrequent words, mapping relevant terms to each driver cluster, and deduplicating), I arrived at 419 single words and 35 two-word phrases distributed across 23 active dictionaries.

Using the software package MAXQDA, I coded every report against every dictionary and measured the density of each driver cluster in each company’s narrative expressed as the percentage of total words that matched each dictionary.

The analysis then proceeded in three stages. First, I calculated the average density for each company to identify which driver clusters each firm emphasised. Second, I ran independent two-tailed t-tests to establish whether differences between paired firms were statistically significant. Third, I classified each driver cluster by its importance in the text: not important, average, elevated, or significant.

This gave me a rigorous, quantitative basis for answering whether a Superfirm’s strategic narrative was measurably different from its competitor’s.

What the Data Revealed

Apple vs HP

In the early 2000s, both Apple and HP were established players in personal computing. Apple centred on design and software innovation with the Mac, which was renowned for its user experience but held a minority share of the PC market. HP was a dominant force in printers, enterprise hardware, and computing infrastructure, with a vast installed base of corporate customers and one of the strongest brands in technology.

Over the next two decades, their trajectories diverged dramatically. Apple launched the iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad, reinventing consumer technology category by category. HP went through a series of leadership changes, a contested merger with Compaq, and struggled to define a coherent strategic direction beyond its legacy enterprise business.

The content analysis told a clear story of divergence. Across the 23 driver clusters, Apple and HP each placed a greater emphasis on eight, with a similar emphasis on seven.

Apple placed computational technologies at a level of significant importance — 1.06% of all words in its annual reports belonged to this driver cluster, far above HP’s 0.56%. Apple also placed significantly greater emphasis on consumer culture and globalisation. These three themes tell us something important: Apple oriented its entire strategic narrative around technology-led consumer innovation on a global scale.

HP, by contrast, placed significant emphasis on business markets and structures (1.37% vs Apple’s 0.98%), reflecting its deeper orientation toward enterprise operations, corporate clients, and operational infrastructure. HP also emphasised education and employment more than Apple.

The distinction is stark. Apple looked outward to the consumer and the world. HP looked inward to the enterprise.

Significant difference measured using a t-test where * is a p-value lower than 0.05 and ** is a p-value lower than 0.01.

Cisco vs Nokia

During the early 2000s, Cisco and Nokia were both leaders in global communications. Though they operated in adjacent segments: Cisco in networking infrastructure powering the internet backbone, Nokia in mobile handsets and telecom equipment, both were classified within the same GICS industry, and both provided the foundational technology for how the world communicated.

By the end of the period studied, Cisco had cemented its position as the dominant provider of enterprise networking, expanding into security, collaboration tools, and cloud infrastructure. Nokia, once the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer, had lost its handset business to Apple and Samsung and had pivoted to become a telecom equipment provider, a fundamentally different and smaller business.

Across the 23 driver clusters, Cisco placed greater emphasis on six, Nokia on ten, with seven similar between them.

Cisco’s most significant emphasis was on business models — 4.16% of all words, far above Nokia’s 3.22%. Cisco also placed significantly greater emphasis on business markets and structures, and consumer culture. These themes reveal Cisco’s strategic focus on how products and services were delivered, how markets were structured, and how customer needs were evolving.

Nokia, by contrast, emphasised financial and economic systems (1.26% vs Cisco’s 0.56%) and education and employment. Nokia’s narrative was weighted toward financial management and workforce considerations rather than market-facing innovation.

Cisco oriented toward the environment. Nokia oriented toward its own financial and organisational mechanics.

Significant difference measured using a t-test where * is a p-value lower than 0.05 and ** is a p-value lower than 0.01.

Gilead Sciences vs Amgen

In the early 2000s, both Gilead and Amgen were well-established biotech firms. Gilead was growing rapidly through its specialisation in antiviral treatments for HIV and hepatitis. Amgen was a leader in oncology and nephrology, widely regarded at the time as the dominant firm in the space — Fortune magazine once called it a “new colossus” of biotech.

Over the next two decades, Gilead expanded aggressively into global markets, built a blockbuster portfolio of antiviral drugs, and ultimately achieved a dominant share of its industry’s profits. Amgen remained a significant player but never captured the same level of profit dominance, despite its strong scientific capabilities and large product portfolio.

Across the 23 driver clusters, each firm placed greater emphasis on six, with eleven similar between them.

Gilead’s significant emphases were on business models (3.22%) and business markets and structures (1.31%). It also placed significantly greater emphasis on computational technologies and globalisation. Like Apple and Cisco, Gilead oriented outward: toward market expansion, technology adoption, and the evolution of how its products reached patients globally.

Amgen emphasised financial and economic systems (0.88%) and policy and regulation (0.31%) significantly more than Gilead. Amgen’s narrative was anchored in regulatory compliance and financial management.

The same pattern emerged. The Superfirm looked outward. The competitor looked inward.

Significant difference measured using a t-test where * is a p-value lower than 0.05 and ** is a p-value lower than 0.01.

Across all three pairs

The cross-industry synthesis crystallised the findings. Of the 23 driver clusters, nine showed a statistically significant difference between the Superfirm and its competitor. Superfirms, on average, emphasised 3.3 driver clusters significantly more than their competitors. Their competitors emphasised 2.0.

But the decisive finding went beyond volume. When I plotted these results on the Growth-Impact Matrix, a clear pattern appeared: Superfirms consistently chose to emphasise driver clusters that scored higher — clusters with rapid growth trajectories and net positive impacts. Their competitors’ emphases tended to cluster around slower-growing or negatively-framed drivers.

I created a simple scoring system to quantify this. Growth is scored from +1 (baseline) to +4 (exponential). Impact is scored from -2 (threat) to +2 (opportunity). The effect of each driver cluster is the product of its growth score and its impact score.

When I summed the effects for each firm, the Superfirms scored an average effect of +6.7. Their competitors scored -0.3. The gap was enormous.

This is a key finding of the entire PhD. It’s not just that Superfirms talk more about external drivers. It’s that they talk about the right ones: the ones with high growth and positive impact. Their strategic narratives are oriented toward structural tailwinds. Their competitors’ narratives are oriented toward operational and financial housekeeping.

There was also a nuance worth noting. Some driver clusters were emphasised by multiple Superfirms — business models, for instance, was significant for both Cisco and Gilead. But the specific words driving the emphasis were different. Cisco discussed ‘products’ and ‘services’. Gilead discussed ‘patients’ and ‘treatments’. Same theme, unique manifestation. This would become a key element of the theory that emerged.

Thematic Strategy

The findings from the three research papers converged on a single idea. Market-dominant firms don’t just have better products or stronger brands. They make deliberate, sustained strategic choices to align with a small number of external drivers of transformation, and they do this more consistently and more emphatically than their competitors.

I called this idea Thematic Strategy.

Thematic Strategy proposes that a firm can find a path to market dominance by adopting a structured approach: identify a small number of long-term drivers of transformation from the external environment, select them as strategic themes, and make those themes the anchor for every subsequent decision the firm takes.

The concept is built on six propositions:

One: Strategic alignment with long-term drivers of transformation provides a path to market dominance. The research identified nearly 300 drivers of transformation. A theme is drawn from these. It is external to the firm, observable over time, and indicates a fundamental structural change, and not a fad or a trend.

Two: Themes must be observable over many years, indicate an underlying structural change, have cross-industry relevance, and lead to action. A theme must pass three tests. Is it observable and sustained? Does it indicate structural change? And does it prompt action from leadership?

Three: Selected themes are the starting point and anchor for all subsequent strategic and operational decisions a firm takes. Once chosen, a theme becomes the organising principle that shapes planning, investment, operations, and culture. It is not a side initiative. It is the centre of gravity.

Four: Multiple themes can be combined to create a distinct competitive advantage. The Superfirms typically emphasised three or four themes simultaneously. These themes can operate across different dimensions of the business and reinforce each other.

Five: The most significant competitive advantages reside with themes that have an expected high-growth future trajectory and a net positive impact. When a firm selects themes that are growing rapidly and that academic and market discourse frames positively, it positions itself along structural tailwinds. This is what the Growth-Impact Matrix captured.

Six: The specific manifestation of each theme can be unique to each firm, and this manifestation provides further opportunities for a distinct competitive advantage. Multiple firms can pursue the same overarching theme. But the way each converts it into products, processes, and operating models can be different. This embeds the theme within proprietary capabilities that competitors cannot easily replicate.

Thematic Strategy sits at the intersection of three established streams of strategic management. It extends strategic foresight by directing it toward a structured set of drivers, not just open-ended scanning. It extends the resource-based view by providing a guide for which resources to build. And it extends strategic positioning by showing how firms can anticipate and reshape industry boundaries rather than simply finding their place within them.

In practice, Thematic Strategy operates at the corporate level. Its primary mechanisms are exogenous drivers of transformation. Once selected, these themes provide the strategic logic that connects what the firm sees in the world, what it invests in, and where it competes. The themes are the through-line. Everything else follows from them.

What makes Thematic Strategy different from existing strategic frameworks is that it elevates the theme — a driver of transformation — as the central unit of analysis. Strategy research has traditionally separated position, resources, and capability into distinct conversations. By placing the theme at the centre, Thematic Strategy creates a common reference point that bridges all three. The theme tells you where to position, what resources to build, and which capabilities to develop.

The core question Thematic Strategy poses to any leadership team is this:

Have we aligned our strategic positioning and capabilities with the most impactful drivers of transformation?

The evidence from this research suggests that the firms that can answer yes to that question, and sustain that answer over many years, are the ones that capture a dominant share of their industry’s profits.

What This Means

Most firms define strategy from the inside out. They start with what they have, their products, their people, their processes, and ask how to make it better. Thematic Strategy says start from the outside in. Look at the structural forces reshaping the world. Choose a small number. Make them yours.

The research showed that across technology, biotech, and telecommunications, the firms that dominated their industries’ profit pools did so by aligning early with a handful of high-growth, positive-impact drivers of transformation. They didn’t chase every trend. They didn’t spread their strategic attention thin. They picked their themes and made them the centre of everything.

Their competitors, facing the same external forces and operating in the same markets, oriented inward; toward financial structures, regulatory management, and operational mechanics. Those are necessary activities. But they are not what creates dominance.

For any executive reading this, the implications are practical. Identify the structural forces that will shape your industry over the next decade. Select three or four. Test them against the criteria: are they observable and sustained, do they indicate structural change, and do they demand action? Then make those themes the anchor for every investment, capability, and positioning decision your organisation takes.

Don’t try to respond to everything. The Superfirms didn’t. They chose a small number of themes and committed to them over many years. The discipline is in the selection and the sustained commitment, not in breadth of coverage.

In a world defined by these drivers of transformation, the firms that thrive will be those that align early, act decisively, and sustain that alignment over time.

That is Thematic Strategy. And the evidence suggests it works.

Read more

Eleven.

Not eleven percent. Eleven companies. Out of 8,430.

That is 0.13% of the firms studied. So rare, I gave them a name: superfirms.

In 70 of the 81 industries, not a single company achieve…

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Here’s the uncomfortable truth I arrived at through my rese…

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It didn’t take me long to understand that tactics don’t create lasting advantage. Anyone can copy tactics. But very few can copy assets.

The firms that …

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A serious strategy should make clear which external forces matter most, what choices follow from that assessment, and which capabilities must be built or abandoned as a result.

If these links are missing, the strategy is incomplete regardless of how compelling it sounds.

What leaders should not acce…

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When strategy is unclear or misaligned, better execution accelerates the wrong trajectory.

Resources are deployed efficiently toward objectives that no longer make sense.

This is why execution-focused turnarounds so often disappoint. They improve operational metrics without addressing the structural cau…

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Markets transform due to advances in technology, new regulations, demographic shifts, geopolitics, and social changes. (To name just a few).

These are not events. They are drivers of transformation.

Strategy exists to decide which of these forces the firm will align with…

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The confusion arises because both involve the future, but they operate at different levels.

Planning assumes the direction is broadly correct and focuses on sequencing actions. Strategy questions whether the direction itself makes sense, given how the environment is changing.

When the two are conflated, organisati…

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If a strategy cannot account for why performance differs across firms facing similar conditions, it is not doing its job.

Ambition, vision, and effort are inputs. Strategy is the logic that connects external conditions to internal choices in a way that makes results intelligible.

This is why good strateg…

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The next challenge was making them usable.

I organised the evidence into four analytical levels:

1) Drivers of transformation (292)

A driver affects humans and their environment. It can be concrete, such as electric vehicles or extreme weather, or abstract, such as…

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Yesterday, I shared the approach I used to narrow my research on the drivers of transformation down to 88 academic articles.

I was left with a serious body of work on drivers of transformation spanning more than 40 years.

The articles came from journals in economics, sociology, medicine, technology, susta…

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Yesterday, I shared that to understand the external drivers of transformation firms are facing, I identified 1,234 peer-reviewed research papers.

Over 10 million words.

The challenge was how to remove almost everything without losing any insight.

Here is how I did it:

1) Read every abstr…

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(And how I identified 292 drivers of transformation).

Every research paper begins with a research method.

At this point in my PhD, I had already defined market dominance and identified eleven firms that achieved it. The next task was much more complex.

I needed to identify the complete set of external drivers of transformation, r…

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It is grounded in the concept of the environment-driven firm:

“there is no single success formula which has universal validity….and the profitability of the firm is optimised when its strategic behaviour is aligned with its environment.” (Ansoff & Sullivan, 1993).

This…

Read more