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Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

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338 BRAND RELEVANCE<br />

unmet needs. The concept was good but hard to implement<br />

because there is such a high level of comfort with the autonomy<br />

of the silo world, and because change is threatening.<br />

Strategic Drift<br />

A signifi cant risk is that the selective opportunism model creates<br />

strategic drift. Investment decisions are made incrementally<br />

in response to opportunities rather than directed by a vision. As<br />

a result, a fi rm can wake up one morning and fi nd that it is in<br />

a set of businesses that lack the needed assets and competencies<br />

and that provide few synergies. A related problem is that an<br />

organization well suited to fi nding and pursuing opportunities<br />

can generate more projects than can be adequately funded, and<br />

at the extreme the lack of resources can doom all of them.<br />

At least three phenomena can turn opportunism into strategic<br />

drift. First, a short - lived, transitory force may be mistaken<br />

for one with enough staying power to make a strategic move<br />

worthwhile. Second, opportunities to create immediate profi ts,<br />

perhaps from specialized customer applications, may be rationalized<br />

as strategic when in fact they are not. For example, a<br />

fi rm making instruments such as oscilloscopes might receive<br />

many requests from some of its customers for special - purpose<br />

instruments that could conceivably be used by other customers<br />

but that have little strategic value for the company. Third,<br />

expected synergies across existing and new business areas may<br />

fail to materialize owing to implementation problems, perhaps<br />

due to culture clashes, or because the synergies were only illusions<br />

in the fi rst place.<br />

The selective aspect of selective opportunities helps reduce<br />

the risk of drift and also the excessive numbers of projects. The<br />

opportunistic fi rm needs to screen opportunities in two ways.<br />

One screen involves eliminating those opportunities that lack<br />

the potential to create new categories and subcategories that the<br />

fi rm can dominate and leverage. The ability to screen out

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