A webinar with a title, The Secret to Today’s Most Successful Companies, is suspicious to me, but maybe I’ve been watching too many bad youtube videos recently. However, this particular HBR webinar is definitely worth watching, twice.

Felix Oberholzer-Gee, a professor in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School and author of the new book, Better, Simpler Strategy: A Value-Based Guide to Exceptional Performance. offers a clear and yes simpler, method to consider how to provide value to customers, but also employees and suppliers.

By focusing on willingness to pay and willingness to sell, companies can begin to identify the creative opportunities that exist to maximize return on investment. Simple. From the many examples given, an exemplary one is Discovery Insurance (South Africa) that in partnership with a grocery chain, offer customers significant discounts on healthy food. For Discovery this gives them a differentiator from competitors, increases the likelihood of their customers staying healthy, and attract customers that are inclined to be healthy anyway. Customers are able to live their best life and the grocery partner gets additional purchases. This strikes me as brilliant understanding of one’s customer – and of course I want to sign up.

For myself, the most interesting points in the webinar are:

• if you lower suppliers cost (including employees), some of that benefit comes back to you, so be generous
• focus on one or two key ways to impact value; not price, or cost, but value; also known as willingness to pay and willingness to sell (i.e. complete on selection)
• take note of the market for compliments to your products and services since as one rises the other falls

The best quotation: “Commodification is just a lack of imagination.”

We at Sunshine Creative believe that creativity is most useful when applied in practice through strategy identification and goal setting. We use our values of Fearless Curiousity and Unapologetic Kindness to consider roles and relationships of clients with their customers, suppliers, employees and society at large. In doing that, we help identify the needs and desires that drive opportunities. In part, this is what “connecting to meaning” is: uncovering the true motivations of people then seeing how they can be supported.

So next time you sit down to do some strategic thinking, like how to grow a business during a global pandemic, or have a decision to make about staff or suppliers, remember to think about value, because money follows value everytime.

Yours in strategic creativity

Linda