Leverage
Perhaps the most potent but underrated word in strategic leadership
In early 2010, I was having lunch with a close friend of nearly 30 years. He’d just quit his job to venture on his own. As a former strategy consultant and serial corporate executive, I understood the motivation, but his strategy threw me.
You see, he spent the last decade working as a sales executive for engineering products. It seemed logical to me to focus his new venture on an area related to that field.
“Tell me about your plans”, I asked, expecting a discussion about a bunch of products and services he was already used to selling.
“Renewable energy”, he responded.
“Really?!”, I said, probably sounding more surprised than I should. “What do you know about renewable energy?”
“Not much”, he replied, sounding a little annoyed that I was indirectly questioning his well laid out plans.
“Talk me through it”, I asked.
“Leverage”, he said with more conviction than I had heard from him so far.
He went on to explain that he had spent a lot of time researching and reflecting on what was happening in the world. He was searching for themes that could lead to changes in customer behaviour and create opportunities for new entrants. He felt the most obvious theme at the time, the transition of offline businesses to online, had too much competition. But the shift towards renewable energy sources, well, that was both much newer, much more underdeveloped and inevitable.
My friend’s approach was to leverage an external driver of technological and social change. The strategic logic is simple: find a powerful disruptive force and arrange the firm around it. Ride the wave, so to speak.
As I become more aware of this type of logic, I saw this approach time and time again. But at the same time, I wondered whether it was a subconscious strategy rather than an explicit and deliberate method.
This led me to a simple research question: could a firm achieve market dominance by leveraging external drivers of technological change? I wanted to know.
After a three-year research project, for which I was awarded a PhD, I concluded with a categorical ‘yes’. I now call this approach Thematic Strategy.
From here on, I’ll explain what it is and how you can apply it.
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I write about Thematic Strategy - a method I developed during my PhD that directs firms to leverage drivers of technological and social change to achieve market dominance.
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