Dilemma of Generating Alternatives for Issue Tree Analysis

Assignments! Assignments! I’m now at the stage of “generating alternatives” section of the Business Strategic Leadership assignment…….

The idea was simple, which was to generate alternatives of a chosen strategic issue. The tips are:

1. Make sure the alternatives are completely different.
2. Make sure the alternatives are not fine-tuning a solution.
3. Exhaust all known alternatives.
4. Use lateral thinking techniques (whatever that is!)

Okay, sound easy? If it is so easy, how come I’m stuck here for days?

My chosen strategic Issue was “how to influence retail Merchants to rollout our payment terminals?”

That sounds easy (at first glance). I could do it:

Alternative 1 : Offer signup incentives to retail merchants such as subsidized terminal rental.

Alternative 2 : Offer attractive MDR to retail merchants.

Wait a minute! Offering attractive MDR was also a form of signup incentive, not so “different” from the idea in Alternative 1. In fact, I could do Alternative 1 together with Alternative 2.

Okay. So I merged the two ideas and it became:

Alternative 1 (revised): Offer signup incentives to retail merchants such as subsidized terminal rental and competitive MDR.

Then, the dilemma came in as well:

Alternative 2 (revised): ????????

I could not think of other different alternatives!

As easy as it might sound, it was definitely not easy when you actually practicing it. That’s why I was stuck for few days.

Experience of Using Strategic Tools At Work

Not too long ago, I was assigned to work out a feasibility study of product in my company. Since I have attended the Business Strategic Leadership course, I’ve decided to use some of the tools learned to flavor up my analysis.

I used the “Battlefield” analysis to take a look at the business at bird’s eye view. The “Battlefield” analysis defined the market place with its competitors (either direct or indirect), substitutes, complements and influencers. The “Battlefield” diagram also showed the simple value chain of the business.

From the bird’s eye view of the “Battlefield”, it easily led me to prepare other notes/slides which would help to justify my case. Based on the same “Battlefield”, other ideas blossomed to support my feasibility study, like SWOT analysis, financial cost vs benefit, and market share chart.

My analysis was concrete and I shared my findings with the MD and management team. All agreed with the findings and they made a decision to keep the product, with unanimous vote!

At least something worked well for me a result from Business Strategic Leadership training, which doesn’t always happen!

Can Every Company Find Its Blue Ocean? (Part 2)

What companies are in Blue Ocean, really? It once said that our country’s very own budget airline AirAsia is in Blue Ocean. It was first to introduce the terminology “Now Everyone Can Fly”. We were all very excited when AirAsia offered affordable air tickets to regional countries. Business were brisk, and thousands of holiday deprived folks (like myself) made bookings 12 months ahead just to get FREE flight tickets (not including fuel surcharge, baggage fee, airport taxes and other fine line charges which can be very substantial!).

Now, every country tries to jump on the bandwagon of ‘budget airlines’. We have Tiger Airways from Singapore, JetStar from Australia, Cebu Pacific in Philippines and Lion Air from Indonesia. Even Malaysian Airlines (not really belonging to the budget airlines category) is offering cheap seats to compete with AirAsia! Now, the thing is, everyone’s swimming into the Blue Ocean, making it not so blue anymore…….

Once a company is successful in its Blue Ocean, others tend to follow. When the Blue Ocean becomes a competitive arena, it loses its edge and become Red Ocean. Sometimes, the Blue Ocean Strategy is not sustainable unless the company is constantly creating a new ocean to swim.

Can Every Company Find Its Blue Ocean? (Part 1)

The Blue Ocean Strategy is a tool to find a profitable business territory which void of any competition. One of the key objectives of Blue Ocean Strategy is not to compete with other in the so-called Red Ocean.

Is there a Blue Ocean for every company, waiting for the company to dive and swim into? If every company is able to find its Blue Ocean, then its ocean will be very small, cause total market size it not infinite…… a funny thing to ponder isn’t it?

Now, I am not 100% skeptical of the Blue Ocean strategy, I’m just not convinced that every company can find its own Blue Ocean.
Take a company that deals with commodity – a sugar refinery company. Sugar is sugar, no matter how you brand it, package it or promote it. How can you find a Blue Ocean Strategy for a sugar producing company?