When Amazon bought Whole Foods, every executive in grocery, and a good many outside it, revisited their version of how the world would unfold. Not because the deal was a surprise in hindsight, but because the blind spot had been scoffed at: never could happen. Seasoned executives use an event like this to retool. Three things keep your company from being eaten.
Revisit your strategic assumptions
Assumptions make visible how your team believes the industry will unfold, rightly or wrongly: product, customer, technology, competition, regulation. Most companies do not have a crisp list, or implications, or a format that drives decisions. The question worth answering every year: who could be our future competition, and why would they enter?
Have a framework to make sense of it
In strategic shorthand, Amazon bought a new product for the customers it already served, using a capability it already owned: distribution and logistics. It also believed, and wrote down, that fresh and organic food would keep growing. Products, markets, capabilities. New product, current customers, core competency. Basic strategy, powerful when the pieces are put together on purpose.
Decide, then make the decision visible
A wave-maker event creates two kinds of company: those that debate it in the corridor and those that run it against their strategy as a scenario and change something. The second kind had a page to run it against.
Why this still matters
Written in 2017, before AI could test an assumption against the market in a day. The MOVE® system holds assumptions, the product-market matrix and capabilities as a base case precisely so that the next Amazon moment is a scenario you run, not a headline you read.
Monday
Name the one acquisition by an outsider that would hurt your company most. Then check whether anything on your current strategy page would have to change if it happened. If nothing would, the page is missing an assumption.
