The Risk-Driven Business Model

CHAPTER 4

The When Strategy

The cliché gets it almost right: timing is everything. Actually, timing and sequence are everything. Determining when you must make key business model decisions and the order in which they are arranged, relative to one another, is crucially important to your business model’s performance and to the value it creates (or destroys). So if you modify the decision pattern to change the absolute timing of key decisions and/or the way they interrelate, you can produce powerful business model innovations.

As we have already seen with Zara, managers, when given enough time, acquire more and better information about the consequences of their decisions. For instance, most business forecasts become increasingly accurate as managers ...