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Make Choiceful Strategic Decisions with the Levers that Matter —Market and Talent

By Karen Chaing

See Karen’s skill profile on Ibbaka Talent

Executives are looking for data-driven insights to make key decisions that will allow them to execute and drive their businesses forward. To be successful, business needs to strike the balance between what its market needs and what it can achieve with its talent. At the end of the day, leaders are tasked with driving business performance and outcomes—outcomes that are usually measured in terms of financial performance. The winning path is to create value for our stakeholders while differentiating to stay or get ahead of the competition. This is the path to sustainable growth.

I am pleased to announce the combination of Ibbaka with TeamFit. This combination allows our company to provide our customers (the likes of Becton Dickinson and the Financial Times) with a lens through which they can make, with peace of mind, choiceful decisions on where to make targeted investments to fuel growth. The businesses we work with are shapers of their industries. To be leaders, they not only need to innovate to drive outcomes but they have the agility to transform.

Let me introduce you to how Ibbaka thinks about driving growth.I will do this by stepping through our model of value, differentiation, and outcomes. As you can see, the central components of growth is value. This is the value provided to customers (V2C). Ibbaka’s process uncovers differentiated value (the value you provide that your competitors do not) alond economic, emotional and community axes.

Value is at the core of our Ibbaka growth pyramid and it is through value that companies deliver outcomes..

Ibbaka Growth Pyramid Copyright 2020

Outcomes are at the top of the pyramid because it is the North Star; it is what the company is striving for (navigating towards). Examples of measures used to gauge this include stock price, company valuation, EBITDA, revenue growth, profitability, market share, and customer lifetime value.

The two key levers to drive value are market and talent.

Market is the culmination of the external factors that you need to address when looking to create your strategic market position. The key building blocks for addressing market are segmentation and pricing. Talent is the internal factor that you also require to meet your objectives. On the talent side, the key building blocks are skills and competencies. Ibbaka Talent provides the leading platform to provide talent insights to move from opportunity to execution.

Ibbaka Market provides a way for a business to understand the value it provides to its stakeholders.

These are framed in terms of economic, emotional and community dimensions. In today’s business world, companies that can are differentiated on all three dimensions will be able to increase pricing power. Value is a shared understanding between a business and its stakeholders. Ibbaka Market shows how to segment and prioritize a market based on value. Pricing is the vehicle to transact and capture value. This transaction of capturing value directly impacts the North Star outcomes.

Ibbaka Talent provides businesses with the insight to understand how its people can contribute to realizing its strategic objectives.

Ibbaka Talent provides a picture of the skills and capabilities at an individual, team, or corporate level. Talent is who will execute and realize the strategic vision of a company. As such, leading firms will invest in their talent to ensure that their people continue to be their strategic advantage.

Learn more about the combination from an Ibbaka Talent perspective here.

I’d like to wrap up here by illustrating how Ibbaka fits into an organization’s strategic thinking by using Roger Martin’s cascading choices model. At Ibbaka, we start by understanding what your ‘winning aspirations’. This is essentially building alignment on the outcomes you are trying to achieve and mapping these to your measures of performance.

Ibbaka Market provides the insight into ‘where to play’ and ‘how to win.’ This is where we inform decisions around value-based segmentation, targeting, and positioning. Ibbaka Market designs pricing, tools, and resources to enable sales and marketing. Ibbaka Talent feeds into capability development by highlighting the skills and competencies needed to support our winning aspirations. The Ibbaka Platform is a system used to collect data and track where an organization is meeting its strategic objectives. It provided the lens through which organizations can see where to target their investments for growth.

I look forward to your feedback and understanding how we at Ibbaka can help you with your strategic investments to grow your business.