Assumptions, the high blood pressure of strategy
The medical community refers to high blood pressure as “the silent killer.” It’s a disease without obvious symptoms and many people, unfortunately, don’t even know they have high blood pressure until a stroke or heart attack kills them.
The “high blood pressure” of strategy is the set of assumptions that the strategy is based upon. The assumptions may have been fine at one point in time but may have degraded over time and may well be wrong when the strategy is stressed.
The roll-call of strategic irrelevancy often finds degraded assumptions at the heart of the matter.
- Manufacturing companies assumed they needed lots of raw material and work-in-process inventory until the Japanese surprised us with “just-in-time” manufacturing.
- Airlines assumed a hub and spoke system was best until SouthWest Airlines got real good at point-to-point.
- Kodak assumed that film-based cameras would have about three more years of sales than they actually had.
- The entire housing and mortgage industry assumed that the price of houses would continue to rise year after year.
- Sears assumed it had a lock on middle class Americans.
Staying with the health care theme of the last few posts, what assumptions do you see your local healthcare providers making? What assumptions do you think they are making with respect to:
- Who will control your “medical home”
- Telemedicine?
- Insurance rates?
- Your attitude about safety?
- Defensive medicine?
- Medical tourism?
- Hospitalists and surgicalists?
- Electronic medical records?
- Elective surgery?
- Patient education?
All industry “truths” are built on assumptions that were true at one time or another.
How many of these truths do you think will prove invalid in the coming couple of years?
Date: October 12th, 2009 @ 20:34
Categories: critical thinking
