The Invincible Company ... another fabulous book from Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur ... the ultimate guide to relentless innovation and growth

Over the past 16 years, Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur have been dedicated to a single mission: how to help companies continuously reinvent themselves.

Their way to do this was not to stand up and give inspiring speeches, although they can, and not to write long-winded books of good ideas and practices, which they could. Instead they dedicate their work to designing better tools, using the power of information design, to create deceptively simple but incredibly useful tools for business.

Most famously they created the Business Model Canvas.

Now they are going further - to consider not just business design, but transformation, and relentless transformation - with a fabulous new book, The Invincible Company.

In reality the crucial question they are trying to answer is this: How can C-Suite leadership teams harmonise the demands of short term business, driven by financial markets and activist investors seeking quick sales and reduced costs, and simultaneously reinvent their organisation, unleash entrepreneurial talent, and position it for future growth?

Alex and Yves joined me at the recent Thinkers50 European Business Forum to explore these challenges in a highly entertaining and interactive innovation lab with the 500-strong audience of business leaders. They make an interesting duo. Alex is the performer, whilst Yves is the impresario – an evolution of their earlier days when Alex was the student, and Yves his teacher.

In preparing for the event, I had a number of Skype calls with Alex, in his Swiss mountain home. It looked more like a nuclear bunker, with plain concrete walls, and a small window showing the snowy mountains outside. In the centre was Alex at his desk, surrounded by 3 huge screens, with his headphones on. It looked like Strategyzer's mission control room.

On the walls were hundreds of yellow Post-It notes, plotting out the new book - lots of keywords, diagrams, arrows, connections - although the Skype camera kept falling to the floor where he was surrounded by weightlifting equipment. I wasn't sure whether "invincible" was more an aspiration for business leaders reading the new book, or for himself.

The new book is now finished and ready to launch. "The Invincible Company" ...

You can download a fabulous "sneak preview" here and pre-order the book here.

Alex's theme back at the European Business Forum was a preview of the new book, “how to build an invincible company” which combined the classic business model canvas with their new approach to innovation portfolios, which are key to the long-term success of any business. It becomes invincible because it builds a whole series of great ideas, innovations and business models that ensure its success today, and into the future.

Alex and Yves believe there are three crucial areas that every company needs to consider in order to remain relevant and prosperous. Firstly, companies have to develop truly ambidextrous organizational structures where the innovation arm is given equal power alongside the existing business. Secondly, this innovation arm needs its very own culture, processes, skills, metrics, and incentives to explore potentially new business models and value propositions. Thirdly, companies need to better manage their portfolio of existing businesses and new opportunities–some that maintain and protect the current business, while cultivating the business models of tomorrow.

A portfolio of current and future businesses

Companies need a new and integrated approach to managing a dynamic portfolio of established and emerging businesses. They have to protect established business models from disruption as long as possible, while simultaneously cultivating the business models of tomorrow.

The key dynamic is "exploit" and "explore" ... Exploit the current business, explore the future business.

Exploit: Every portfolio starts with a look at managing and improving the businesses you already have. Here you assess two areas:

1. Profitability: How much profit do the existing business models generate?
2. Disruption risk: How protected is your business model, and how likely is it to be disrupted? Models at risk may be very established businesses, but prone to disruption for technology, market, or regulatory changes.

Explore: As you manage the present, you also look toward the future for new areas of growth. Here you assess two different areas:

1. Expected profitability: How big can an idea for a new business become? What’s the potential? How big is the size of the new market, revenue potential, pricing, etc. Equally important here is to judge how robust a business model is: e.g. in terms of recurring revenues, long term growth, scalability, protection from competition, etc.
2. Innovation risk: Here you evaluate how much you de-risked a good looking business initiative. These ideas may have no evidence, and may be very risky to invest in. The more you are confident an initiative will work based on tests and the resulting evidence, the more you may choose to invest time and resources into it. This is where the Lean Startup–founded and conceived by Steve Blank, then popularized by Eric Ries–has great potential to help large companies tackle the challenges that come with de-risking innovation. We have been involved with the process from the beginning.

It is important to point out that the invention of new businesses is a search process. Finding and validating a new growth engine is a very iterative process, contrary to the managing of an existing business.

Yves and Alex have been prototyping the Business Portfolio Map for a while now, to help organizations measure and assess if the existing portfolio is healthy, if the business is prone to disruption, and ultimately, to help companies make better investment decisions. Indeed trying to explain a new concept to 500 business leaders is a great test of its coherence and completeness.

It also made me think back to the recent Thinkers50 Global Awards event last November, when they did one of the most interesting sessions I've ever seen, on how to turn any business theory - take AG Lafley's Play to Win, Jim Collin's Good to Great - or whatever you like, and turn the big ideas into practical, dynamic, and thoughtful tool. There are probably too many meaningless diagrams and theories in business. Instead Alex and Yves work is fabulous information design in action.

Examples of invincible companies

Great examples of such companies include Amazon, the reinvention of Fujifilm and transformation of PingAn.

Amazon is frequently cited as a company that intentionally manages a diverse portfolio of existing and promising new business models. The company continues to produce growth with its existing businesses (e-commerce, AWS, logistics, etc.), while juggling a portfolio of potential future growth engines that may become big profit generators one day (e.g. Alexa, Echo, Dash Button, Prime Air, Amazon Fresh, Mayday Button, etc.).

Building an "invincible" organization is something investors should be demanding: it helps companies better allocate capital and put people with the right skills at the right stage of development. But of course, it also means you have to keep investing in new ideas and businesses. It's not easy, but vital if you want to sustain your business in a turbulent and uncertain future.

The truth is, there’s never going to be a right time to start. If you don’t want to end up like Kodak, Nokia, or Blackberry, then you have to start now.

You can download the sneak preview here, and order the book here.

Peter Fisk is a global thought leader on growth, innovation and leadership. He is founder of GeniusWorks, a business innovation company, based in London; Professor of strategy, innovation and marketing at IE Business School in Madrid; and Thinkers50 Global Director. From nuclear physics to managing the Concorde brand, he has 25 years of practical business experience, working with business leaders in over 300 companies and 55 countries. He is author of 7 bestselling books, including the most recent, “Gamechangers: Are you ready to change your world?”. His next book “Business Recoded” is published in September 2020. More at www.theGeniusWorks.com