> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.pesec.no/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Demystifying strategic growth - URL: https://www.pesec.no/demystifying-strategic-growth/ - Published: 2021-05-13T07:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-02T19:27:20.000Z - Description: Learn how to identify growth possibilities and strategic choices to exploit them. - Author: Bruno Pešec - Tags: Webinar, Strategy, #table-of-content Is all growth good? Should all options be pursued? How to identify viable growth opportunities in your organisation? And once you do, what to do with them? I firmly believe that only strategic growth is worth pursuing. And by "strategic" growth I mean business growth that is: - meaningful, - aligned, - focused, and - profitable. Even seasoned veterans tend to forget that innovation—introducing new products, services, and business models—and branding—narrative that follows them—are the two most potent levers for strategic growth. Based on our experience helping executives grow their businesses, [Matthew Fenton](https://matthew-fenton.com/?ref=pesec.no) and I have developed two tools to help you identify growth possibilities and strategic choices to exploit them: 1. *The Strategy Gap*, a nearly infinite source of growth ideas. 2. *The Four Growth Arenas*, a two-by-two matrix to help you decide on how to exploit the opportunity at hand. In this webinar I introduce both tools, and how to use them in order to identify options for strategic growth in your own organisations. You can find recording, presentation, timestamps, and license information below. ## Webinar recording Download the presentation [here](https://app.box.com/s/y8mv6w8lqlj4slwc59hp8r7jv8ujkvp8?ref=pesec.no). ## Webinar timestamps | Time | Topic | | ----- | --------------------------------------------- | | 01:05 | Seeing differently. | | 05:54 | Strategic growth. | | 07:36 | Opportunities and possibilities. | | 10:32 | Seeing opportunities: The Strategy Gap. | | 14:51 | Seeing opportunities: Gap analysis. | | 21:51 | Seeing possibilities: The Four Growth Arenas. | | 25:14 | Growth Arena: Indomitable Core. | | 27:28 | Growth Arena: New Product Line. | | 28:48 | Growth Arena: New Category. | | 31:30 | Growth Arena: New Venture. | | 33:08 | From opportunities to possibilities. | | 36:00 | Succeed or perish. | | 40:21 | Strategic growth summarised. | ## Webinar summary In this webinar, I introduce tools to help business leaders identify and exploit growth opportunities. My core argument is that **only strategic growth**—growth that is meaningful, aligned, focused, and profitable—is worth pursuing. I believe innovation and branding are the most powerful levers for achieving this. The session presents two tools I developed with Matthew Fenton: **The Strategy Gap** (to uncover opportunities) and **The Four Growth Arenas** (to transform opportunities into actionable possibilities). Strategic growth is defined by four criteria: - **Meaningful**: Creates an impact that the organisation registers as significant. - **Aligned**: Ensures coherence across the organisation, avoiding fragmented efforts. - **Focused**: Concentrates resources on specific, high-impact objectives. - **Profitable**: Delivers sustainable financial returns. Opportunities are identified, while possibilities are *created* by defining how to exploit them: - **Opportunity**: A potential benefit that *might* be achievable but lacks a defined path to exploitation. - **Possibility**: An opportunity with a clear, actionable pathway—where the organisation is *ready, willing, and able* to act. The **Strategy Gap** is the multi-dimensional space where untapped potential exists in the exchange of value between a business and its market. It is divided into three sub-gaps: | **Gap** | **Focus Area** | **Example** | | ------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Capability Gap** | Mismatch between business capabilities and the value propositions it aims to deliver. | Operating model inefficiencies in producing new value propositions. | | **Value Gap** | Mismatch between existing value propositions and the needs/desires of current customers. | Existing customers want features not currently offered in a product line. | | **Conversion Gap** | Mismatch between existing customers and the broader target market. | Barriers preventing non-customers in the target market from adopting the offering. | The Strategy Gap helps businesses systematically identify opportunities by examining these intersections. The **Four Growth Arenas** is a 2x2 matrix inspired by Ansoff’s framework, mapping **innovation** (existing vs. new products/services) against **branding** (existing vs. new brand). It provides a structured way to evaluate how to exploit opportunities: | **Arena** | **Products/Services** | **Brand** | **Description** | **Example** | | -------------------- | --------------------- | --------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | **Indomitable Core** | Existing | Existing | Incremental improvements to existing offerings under the current brand. | Adding computing power to an existing gaming laptop line. | | **New Product Line** | New | Existing | Introducing new products/services under the existing brand. | Launching a gaming smartphone under the same brand as gaming laptops. | | **New Category** | Existing | New | Repackaging or rebranding existing offerings to appeal to a new segment or narrative. | Creating a new eco-friendly sub-brand for existing cleaning products. | | **New Venture** | New | New | Launching new products/services under a new brand, often as a separate entity. | Establishing a standalone venture (e.g., "Gaming Smartphones LLC") for a new product line. | **Key takeaways I wish to highlight are:** 1. **Not all growth is strategic**: Focus on growth that is meaningful, aligned, focused, and profitable. Avoid chasing growth at any cost. 2. **Innovation and branding drive growth**: These are the two most potent levers for creating strategic value. 3. **Distinguish opportunities from possibilities**: Opportunities are potential benefits; possibilities are actionable paths with defined means to achieve them. 4. **Use the Strategy Gap to uncover opportunities**: Systematically analyse capability, value, and conversion gaps to identify untapped potential. 5. **Leverage the Four Growth Arenas to prioritise action**: Evaluate opportunities by mapping them to the arenas, ensuring clarity on how to exploit them (e.g., incremental improvement, new product line, rebranding, or new venture). **One practical thing you can do today:** **Start with the Value Gap**: Engage 5–20 existing customers to identify small, high-impact improvements to your current offerings. This approach is low-cost, low-risk, and leverages your strongest asset—your existing customer base—to drive immediate, strategic growth. ## Webinar transcript *Machine generated and cleaned up by hand, might contain errors.* Hello. Welcome to Demystifying Strategic Growth webinar. My name is Bruno Pešec, and I help business leaders innovate profitably. Before we kick off with the webinar, I just want to invite you, since we are on Zoom, on the bottom of your screen, you should find a chat box, Q&A box, and some other buttons. So please feel free to use both chat and Q&A box to type in your questions, comments, reflections, anything and everything you'd like to share, and I'll come to that at the end of the webinar. Just give me a second to share my screen, and then we will start off with the webinar. And don't worry, this is recorded, so if you miss something, you can re-watch that a bit later. So as I said, today the focus is going to be on strategic growth. But before I move to strategic growth, this really is about seeing differently. I'm going to show you two tools to see growth differently, and that will enable you then to find new growth opportunities and transform them potentially into growth possibilities. But the thing is, what does seeing differently mean? What does it mean to you? What does it mean to me? Well, I cannot say what it means to you, but I want to share a few exercises to demonstrate what does it mean to me. So let's begin with this simple exercise. So just spend 10, 15 seconds looking at this image and write down, or in your head, or type in chat, what do you actually see here? Do you see anything? Do you see nothing? I'd be curious to hear from you. If you don't see anything, it's not a problem, but what's actually here is a giraffe. So if you look at the centre of the image and start going down, you can notice the neck of the giraffe. And you go up, you can notice the ears of the giraffe looking to the left side and nose and eyes to the right side. So from potentially seeing a mess to seeing a giraffe. Now, let's take a look at a similar illustration, and again, spend 10 to 15 seconds looking at it and noticing, what are you seeing? Again, feel free to share in chat, or just write it down, or you can keep it to yourself. I will not judge. This is actually from 19th century, known as "The Wife and Her Mother-in-Law," or your mother-in-law. But this is actually an illustration that shows, in the same image, a young lady and an old lady. So if you cannot see it, the older lady, she has the white on the bottom is like the chin, and the big thing turning to the left is her nose. So that is the older lady. The younger lady, actually what is the nose of the old lady is the cheek of the young lady as she is looking to the side. Now, why did I share these two? It isn't to play tricks or try to guess what's in the image, who's the smartest or whatnot. That's not the point at all. The point is what I said before, seeing differently. So the giraffe image. Once you notice the giraffe, it's almost impossible not to notice it. Does that mean the giraffe wasn't there before? Or that it doesn't exist for the others? Sounds pretty philosophical, but when we take that to the business, think of the cases when something is extremely obvious to you, or you have a colleague that keeps saying, "Why are we not doing this? This is the way forward," and no one else sees it. Just because others don't understand it doesn't mean it's not there. Another thing is, remember this image whenever you feel that you're explaining something to someone, and they're just not getting it, and you're getting frustrated. Again, just because something is obvious to you does not mean it's necessarily obvious to them. That's why it's important to help others to see differently, and that's why I use this image. The image to the right, although it falls in the same family of optical illusions, sometimes called, it's not actually the same message. So the image on the right isn't old lady or young lady. It's not either/or. It is both of them are present at the same time. And what does that, again, mean in the business setting is that sometimes what we see isn't just A or B, it is both A and B. Sometimes when we have an opportunity to exploit or some happening and we're deciding how to react to changes in the market, it's not A or B or C or D. It might be all of the things are true at the same time. Disruption really is happening, and at the same time, we are getting more and more profitable. That's a common case I sometimes hear from innovation leaders. "How could we be getting disrupted? This industry is obviously not getting disrupted. Our revenue is through the roof." These two are not exclusive. So, these two are the cases, just small illustrations of what I mean by seeing differently. Now I want to show and share with you two tools to see growth differently. What do I mean by strategic growth? So again, as I said, I help business leaders innovate profitably. So here, I am talking about strategic growth in the context of business. And to me growth classifies as strategic when it's meaningful, aligned, focused, and profitable. And aligned and focused, people say, "Aren't these the same things?" Not really. You can be aligned on doing a lot of things at once, so you're aligned and unfocused. Or you could be extremely focused, but everybody in the organization is extremely focused on their own small thing and don't make a coherent whole. So you would have a focused but unaligned organization. Both are important. Meaningful. Meaningful means that it makes an impact that you register. This is very different for every organization. A large enterprise, you might be doing something on the scale of 40 million euros, and they would be, "We don't even register it." Small startup, wow, it might be the world to them. The same if you're thinking about for impact businesses. So meaningful change might be one life in case of a small startup, while, for example, for a global organization dealing with child rights, changing hundreds of thousands of lives is the impact they're looking at. Again, strategic growth must be meaningful, aligned, focused, and profitable at the end of the day. There is this big fame of just chasing growth at every cost, at every means necessary, just to grow. And you're hoping that something profitable will come out of it. That's not the type of growth I'll be talking about today. You can notice how peculiar and maybe pedantic I am around the words, their meanings, the images, et cetera. I have here two words that I'd be curious to hear from you. How would you define an opportunity, and how would you define possibility, and the relationship between the two? So think a little bit about it. Again, feel free to type in chat or keep it to yourself. No judgement here. But let's spend 10, 15 seconds on that. So you can see here, I added an arrow in between those two. So for me, an opportunity is something that might or might not be beneficial. It's simply an opportunity, something we see out there that looks we might benefit from it. But it's not until we actually add how we might benefit from it that we can turn it into a possibility. Just because market is growing doesn't turn it magically into possibility. Yes, it might be an opportunity, but unless you're ready, willing, and able, and have specific means to reach those ends, it's not really a possibility. So that is why I put those two and I connect them. They are related. And I'm not advocating here for hard separation, but rather distinction between these two terms. Because when you distinguish them, you're able to actually get better at doing each. And I'm actually going to share today two different tools, one focused on discovering and identifying opportunities, seeing opportunities, seeing possibilities, and one focused exactly on just possibilities. When I'm talking about seeing opportunities, I developed a tool together with Matthew Fenton, and we call it the strategy gap. For seeing possibilities, we call it four growth arenas. And again, I'm going to cover both of these. This comes from our experience, both working with different clients, and those clients include everything from large global enterprises to a big number of startups, small, medium-sized enterprises, entrepreneurs, and et cetera, together also with our knowledge. So not just working, but also a lot of theory, practice, combining that, and bringing something coherent and simple that produces results. Moving forward, as I said, first, we are going to focus on seeing opportunities or the strategy gap. Now, when we think about business, and we try to bring business or enterprise to its kernel, what I like to say is, at its core, it's about exchange of value between your business and the market you're serving. This exchange of value should be bidirectional. So you are creating some value, and the market is finding that value to be attractive, and in return, they're providing some value to you. Now, I'm purposely using against the word value because value could be monetary gain, which is most common, and I often use the word profitability, et cetera. Value can also be in case of governmental organizations, so providing certain specific services. And what's back from your target market, the benefactors, is it comes through the tax, but the value back is actually progress of society. So that's a little bit of a sideline if you're a NGO or a government organization. When we start focusing on the flow of value or this exchange of value, we can find so much in the organization, in the intersection between the organization and the market, and in the market itself. And that is why I stress, okay, there is this fundamental exchange of value, and there is fundamental strategy gap that widens and narrows over time, and although I here illustrate it as two-dimensional, it's actually multi-dimensional. You have always a whole 360 strategy gap that is shortening and expanding over time. Now let's take a bit more granular view. Expression of the business or what is the exchange of value between the business and the target market happens through the medium of value propositions. Again, here I'm using value propositions and not just products and services because value propositions includes your products and services, but also how you talk about them, the benefits they produce, the feeling they produce, how are they distributed. It's multifaceted because you can reuse your product and services and have multiple value propositions. The opposite is possible as well. At the same time, on the right side, you rarely have 100% of your target market. You always have existing consumers. Now, when we separate these four elements, then we can also start narrowing in the strategy gap. So between your business and your value proposition is something that we like to call capability gap. So this is everything. Okay, we have certain value propositions, and this is how we make them. What are the opportunities there? Then my favourite is between value proposition and existing consumers, what we call the value gap. So okay, we're currently providing some value propositions, but how are they matching the needs and desires of our existing consumers? Let me tell you, it's very rarely 100%. It's always some mismatch, and that's perfectly fine. Your job isn't to satisfy everybody in the world, not even in your existing or, sorry, targeted market segment. But it's still very interesting because these are the people that are already buying your products and services and value propositions. So they are the best ones to learn from as quick as possible. Now, understanding the difference between existing consumers and your whole target market is the conversion gap. Again, here you can identify many different opportunities. When we understand this as a concept, then it becomes, well, I don't want to say trivial, but it becomes relatively easy to start looking into this. You don't need fancy tools. You don't need to hire 10,000 analysts or five analysts to start analyzing these gaps. You can use your knowledge of your business and of your expertise to start figuring out, okay, what's hiding in these cracks? So then the next step, when you understand this relationship, is a simple gap analysis. And I'm just going to share a few examples, but the order I'm going through isn't the order that's necessary you need to follow every time. So I'll just start from left to right, but you can always start in your organization wherever you want. Capability gap, as I said, I'm a big advocate of starting from the value proposition. So when you understand what kind of value you need to produce, then start looking at, okay, how could we produce that value as simple and as easy as possible? In essence, this is a lot about understanding your operating model. So operating model includes your processes, think Porter and the value chain. It includes your management structure. It includes everything from strategy management to practice to operations. So it's the totality of your business that's concerned with creation and delivery of value. Now, it's also possible to think from your business to the value proposition. So kind of you could start and say, "Well, this is what we have. What is it that we could make?" That's perfectly fine. Just be careful not to fall into the gap of creating things and then trying to find customers for that. If you decide to start from your internal capabilities and resources and say, "Let's figure out what we can make," make sure that that is tied to what your target customer wants, so you will minimize the risk of creating a solution too early. The value gap, as I said, my favourite, focuses pretty extremely on the difference between what you currently are offering and what your existing consumers really want, need, desire. Again, this might sound very pedantic, like, "Bruno, why are you so pedantic on these words and existing consumer, existing this, existing that?" Well, because I know from experience, this is the best position to start with without wasting a lot of money, without wasting a lot of time, and without wasting a lot of resources. Because then the only thing you need to fill in are small gaps that are very easy to check out. I'm talking about if you're in the B2C, business to consumer market, you need to talk with 20 people. That's not so dramatic in a B2C segment. In a B2B, it's a bit slower, but again, you need to talk at five employees at one company that are relevant for your value proposition to quickly check those small value gaps. And the thing is, because those people are already with you, they're already your existing consumer, your cost is much lower, your barrier to entry is much lower. What you learn from these people, you can use to shorten the conversion gap. So that is why I'm so focused on the value gap, because when you can understand that flow of value in that moment, at that intersection, at that exchange, at that X moment, a pivotal moment, it's so easy to flow both ways. The conversion gap is understanding, okay, we do have existing consumers, but we are not converting the whole market as we want to. We don't have the percentage of the market share that we want to have. So now we want to focus on the differences between our existing consumers and those that we're not able to get. Again, as I said before, when you focus on the value gap, you already identify all the small things for your existing consumers. Now you start focusing on the difference between existing consumers and the target market to understand why aren't they converting as well. It may be the cases of just not understanding the wording properly. It's a simple fix, but it may be bigger changes as well, where you basically realize that your existing consumer base is quite different to the rest of your target market. Maybe you will need to abandon them. Who knows? You can discover it here. Now, we should also not overlook the whole strategy gap. So as we say, these three are smaller gaps to help you focus your activities so you don't feel overwhelmed. And it's also easier to start with smaller gaps, especially the value gap that I keep emphasizing so much. But overall, the strategy gap is the thing. And the strategy gap, you could just, as I said, draw this target market and say, "Okay, this is our business. This is our value proposition. How do our gaps look like if we decide to focus on another market or to enter a new market that's unlike our existing market?" Bam! Simple tool to analyse it. You could also say the opposite. You could say, "Okay, we want the same market, but we want to start serving them completely different value propositions." What implications does that have on our capability gap? What implications does that have on our value gap? So let's say that you're a producer of electronic equipment and your main products are, let's say, laptop, because it's in front of you. And you say, "We want to serve those same people, but we want to start serving them, for whatever reason, ice cream." That will have pretty major implications. But let's say it's more subtle. Let's say, okay, we're already serving them laptops, and we're serving them gaming devices, gaming laptops. So now we want to start serving them gaming smartphones. Okay. Still the same target market, gamers. We still have existing consumers, but suddenly we don't have existing consumers anymore because we said gaming smartphones. We don't have value propositions. We don't have our business, our operating models aren't made to that one-to-one. Bam. Start analysing backwards. So hopefully this gave you a little bit of understanding and why I said I'm focused on seeing differently and the strategy gap and how to find opportunities using it. And I actually did already a very detailed webinar on that one that you can find at my website under resources. That's why also I didn't go into most specific details right now. I encourage you to go and watch this one when you can. Besides strategy gap, exercises to identify opportunities in every gap, it also has a little bit of what's the number one reason why companies lose market share. It has some of the fears when it comes to growth and innovation and other cool stuff. Now, we went through seeing opportunities, using strategy gap to identify opportunities. What about transforming and seeing possibilities in those opportunities? Well, that's something that I'm about to cover right now. Four growth arenas have been inspired by Ansoff's matrix, which is a pretty old school tool. The way it's promoted or disseminated online isn't actually how Ansoff described it. So he never called it Ansoff matrix, and it was never two by two. It was actually one by N, meaning that it went into infinity. What Ansoff was looking at was two specific things. One was introduction of products, he called, but you could consider today products and services. And another one was market. Either you're within the market you're already in, or you're entering a new market. We were inspired by how he found a simple way to make very, I don't want to say easy strategic decisions, but at least he simplified it with the decision-making tool that improved the quality of decision-making. When we were thinking about, okay, we have these opportunities, how do we turn them into possibilities? Well, there are two levers of growth when we go to the core of it. There are only two levers of growth. One is branding, another one is innovation. And at the risk of sounding extremely simplistic, is branding is how people talk about the value propositions that you have and how you talk about the value propositions you have. And innovation is about transforming ideas into money or benefits if you're not producing something that's sold. This might sound very simplified, but really, when you go at the core of it, it's these two levers. Now the question becomes, okay, if we have opportunities, how can we turn them into possibilities when we consider branding and innovation? We map two axes, horizontal, innovation, vertical, branding. And then next step, we consider on the horizontal, the left, we replace innovation with existing products and services, and the right with new products and services. Existing versus new? Well, you define that. You can go with existing, new to us, or existing, new to the world. I suggest that existing, new to you, and then keep it consistent. The vertical, the branding, again, we replace with existing brand on the lower side and new brand on the top side. So suddenly we have four strategic choices. We can have existing products and services with existing brand, we can introduce new products and services under existing brand, we can use existing products and services and recombine them under new brand, or we can introduce new products and services under new brand. Each four of those has specific responses and offers specific strategic choices. So I'm just going to show them. We name them. Of course, we have to name every box because it makes it easier for people. And I will shortly go through each one of those and offer some examples. So under existing brand, existing products and services is something I like to call indomitable core. Why do you call it indomitable core? Because when we look at human systems, as human are ourselves as beings, you need to have a strong core to have a good life. That core usually refers to the belly and that area. When you have a strong core, you can do a lot of physical exercise. You can do a lot of punishing physical exercise. A lot of lifting goes to the core. A lot of our movement goes to the core. When we are feeling unstable, you lower the core. When you need to push something, you tighten the core. Core is very important. The same goes to the business. Now, there are some discussions. What makes a core? What's your core business? I like to look at the numbers. So whatever contributes to around 70% to 80% of your net economic profit is most likely your core. Now, the problem is, for example, what happened to Yahoo at one moment was, well, Yahoo suddenly had most of their value derived from them owning, at that time, shares of Alibaba, AliExpress, and that whole consortium. So their core wasn't owning shares. Their core wasn't them being an investment company. So they had the mismatch between their activities and where most of their value sits. Their case was an outlier. That rarely happens, I would say, and it shouldn't happen in your case. So you can pretty confidently go and look at your numbers, your financial reports, to try to understand, okay, what is actually our core business? So the responses that sit at this quadrant are basically improvements to existing brand, existing products, and services. So we were already using an example of a gaming laptop. So adding more computing power, nicer packaging, while still using the same name of the device line, that would be investments in indomitable core. Now, moving to the right, keeping under existing brand, but deciding to introduce new value proposition, new products, new services, is very similar to actually opening a new product line. So in the case of what we were discussing, gaming laptop, here we could both have introducing another gaming laptop, which would be under the same name. So, for example, if we had a 13-inch laptop and now we want to introduce a 15-inch laptop, that would be something similar. But also introducing a smartphone, like a gaming smartphone that we use as example, if we would keep the same brand, it would actually fit in here. What you here consider, again, that qualifies as a new product versus just an upgrade to the old product is left up to you. But the bigger the implications are, the more likely it's something new. For example, you could say that just changing the screen size could be investment in the indomitable core only if there are no significant implications to your manufacturing process. But if you need to open new plants, or do new tooling, or something similar, then it would be pretty much new product line. Keeping the existing products and services, but doing them under a new brand is very similar to introducing new category. And here I like to use the examples of, for example, consumer products, so perishable goods. You have a collection of products, basically a bundle of products, but you decide to put different labels, have different narrative around it. For example, let's say that you have a family of cleaning products, and you decide that, okay, we want to increase the market share, and we want to increase it for a specific segment that reacts better to different wording. For whatever reason, they like a different narrative. So for that reason, we're introducing a new brand with a new narrative, but it's repackaged products and services, so the value proposition appears as new, while in reality, it's based on what you already have. This is very common, and this is a great way to actually reuse your existing resources. Because if you find something in the conversion gap and in the value gap that can be addressed by changing the narratives, changing how you present, how you talk about your products and services, that's a great, simple, and easy way to do so. Of course, you always need to be careful about the relationship of your brands. Brands as a word has different meaning for different industries. So in perishable goods, it's very common that companies like P&G, Procter & Gamble, they own a lot of brands. At the same time, you might have different industries like what I used to say, the IT industry, where you would have big companies owning few brands, or in some cases, the company is the biggest brand. So if we talk about Apple, Apple is the brand. Why would Apple want to do something off-brand? It would make very little sense because their brand is so valuable, and they can always leverage it. So there is no reason for them to come up with new brand. They might have different sub-brands, but they're always tied to Apple. It's always obvious. If you go to Alphabet, that owns now Google, YouTube, and everything, or is former Google, retitled Alphabet, they do have a lot of brands. Google is their strongest brand, but they have a lot of smaller brands that sometimes it isn't even clear that they're owned by Alphabet, or it isn't promoted that their relationship with Google and et cetera, because they're brands on their own. The final, or not the final quadrant, but the fourth quadrant is when you decide to both introduce new brand while also introducing new value propositions. And this is something that I like to call new ventures. Creating new ventures. They may be internal ventures, they may be external. That's always a possibility. The thing here is, this is the quadrant where there's the most risk, you're taking the most risk, but also the upside might be the biggest. Here, the example would be if you go back to the gaming laptops, if the company decided, "Okay, we want to introduce a new gaming smartphone. It will not be under our umbrella. We will set up a Gaming Smartphones LLC." And since we never did gaming smartphones, well, that's obviously our new product and service. Suddenly, they're setting up a new venture. That venture might be governed internally, so it might be within a business unit, let's say, new business introduction or something similar, or R&D, or if they have innovation unit, so it might be there. But it might also be a venture that's on the outside. So they might say, "Okay, we are going to partner with a venture studio, and we're going to co-invest. So it's not CVC, it's a venture studio. And we will together set up a joint venture, and we will start validating, auditing, and checking out all the good practices of innovating." I just shared these four quadrants, but you might still have a question, like, "How does this help me move from opportunity to possibility?" Worry not, I have illustration for that as well. The main idea is you have the strategy gap to understand different opportunities, and then you want to select few opportunities. I'm always in favour of few opportunities versus hundreds of opportunities. There are countless opportunities out there, but you should always select the ones that you feel, "Okay, at this moment, this is what we're hungry for." And then always keep adding fresh one. Let's say, in this case, you selected one opportunity. As I said in our example, you selected our opportunity is we have noticed that our gamer base wants to have something more than their gaming laptops. They are hungry to play when they're, I don't know, on toilet, on a cruise, on an airplane. They want to be playing. They don't want to stop playing. So that is our big opportunity. Now, when we start talking, we said from opportunity to possibility. Ready, willing, enable, specific way together, specific pathway from A to B. Okay, so if that's an opportunity, we have four possible responses that can get our creative juices flowing. We could use what we have to satisfy those gamers in a multitude of locations. We could introduce new products with the same name, so that will resonate with them. They will recognize us, and at the same time, we will try to offer something new to feed their need. Or we could have our gaming laptops, but maybe we could try to somehow rebrand them, have a different narrative around them so that they realize that maybe they should be taking our laptops to airplanes and those other places so they can keep playing. Or we could try to do something different. As we said, we could try to introduce a new smartphone under a new name, new narrative, new brand. We might set up a new venture. So all those four examples would be different possibilities. And there's nothing stopping you to have more possibilities in every quadrant. So you could discuss putting down, okay, we could introduce all these product lines. We can introduce all these brands. We could set this up all as ventures. It opens so much possibilities, and only creativity, only your mind is the limiting factor. So that is how you go from opportunities to possibilities. And then the thing is, when you have possibilities, that is what you should be actually prioritizing, evaluating, not your opportunities. Opportunity is quickly evaluated in the beginning. Okay, is this market segment big enough by itself? We can express that in dollar or euro value. If not, move on. If yes, cool. That's it. Keeping it simple. Keeping it stupid simple. Now, when that is done, another question is, what's the relationship between those four? When you start projects, investments, all of them that start on the outside of indomitable core have only two ways to go. Either they become part of your core, meaning that they start contributing to the profitability and success of your business, or they should get killed. And I'm simplifying here. You don't need to kill them. You can sell them if you want to. If they are successful, but not successful enough for you. And this relationship is important because it shows that things change over time. Something that's a new venture cannot be new venture for 30 years. Then you're doing something wrong. Then you're not taking it seriously. New category cannot be new forever. The same goes for new product line. How new is new depends on your industry as well. In the world of smartphones, new is old in few months. In the world of cars, new is old, well, depends, it could be a year. In airplane industry, new is old a bit longer. When I used to work in freight train industry, so I used to design freight trains, and was dealing with manufacturing of them. Those trains were designed to have a lifetime of 25 years. In most cases, they had a usable lifetime of a century. What's new to old there? That depends on your industry. But this relationship is critical because it shows you that your investments, in the end, should contribute to your success. As I said, profitable, aligned, focused, meaningful. That's what makes a strategic growth. It should become a part of your indomitable core. If you don't have that plan, then it's really unnecessary. Why start the investment at all? These two tools might seem extremely simple. I would say that they are extremely simple, and I think that that's the beauty of them because they help you, yourself, and others that you work with to start seeing things that were always there, but your sensibility for them wasn't there. And what I mean by that is understanding that there are always opportunities out there. Not all opportunities need to be pursued, but the opportunities that you find very interesting should be considered. How do they make possibilities? And that is where you can start using the four growth arenas to start understanding, okay, we could be contributing to an indomitable core, so we could do incremental improvements. We could consider introducing new product line. We could consider introducing new category. We could consider introducing new venture. Those four, very simple, but each one of those opens a world of possibilities. And then you start having, okay, these are the possibilities that we have at hand. What do we have? What do we want? How can we go further? Innumerable possibilities start opening up, and that is how you can find strategic growth in every part of your organization. Now, before moving forward, I will just use an opportunity to take a look at your questions, as I promised, and just allow me a second. Perfect. Yes. Okay. Everything was so clear. So, no specific questions, or maybe I failed to see them. I have to admit that. Although being on the younger side, technology isn't always the easiest thing to wrestle. So, it happens. Everything that you've seen, you can always reach out to me, and I'm happy to share specific writing or the references or something that you heard and sounded interesting. So if you're interested in digging into all tons of material, always happy to share or anything else. I read way too much, and I'm happy to share the knowledge. To sum up, abstract representation of what we just discussed, seeing opportunities, seeing possibilities, the strategy gap, and four growth arenas. Making it a little bit more detailed, this is the things to focus on in order to identify your possibilities for strategic growth that can drive and contribute meaningfully to long-term success of your business. I will stop sharing the screen so you can enjoy in the full width of my face and presence. This has been Demystifying Strategic Growth webinar. Thank you very much for joining. Thank you very much for listening. If you have any questions, comments, feel free to reach out, and I wish you success in your business and all the best. ## Licence Copyright © 2021, Bruno Pešec. All rights reserved. ## Questions? Don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.