Texts on strategy and innovation are full of great ideas of new things that leaders should do. But, lamented a senior executive I was with recently, “There aren’t any textbooks on what to stop doing!” In a world of temporary advantage, stopping things—exiting declining advantages—is every bit as critical as starting things. Activities need to stop because they can no longer demonstrate good growth potential, or perhaps competitors have made them a commodity, or perhaps they simply have few growth prospects.
In the last chapter, we explored how the growth outlier firms use a process of continuous small changes to avoid having to make more substantive exit and disengagement decisions. But not all firms are so fortunate—there ...
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