Business Model Renewal: How to Grow and Prosper by Defying Best Practices and Reinventing Your Strategy

Forget “business as usual.”

Don’t believe everything you read about “best practices.”

There is no “magic bullet.”

When your market changes, you have to change your strategy and take control of your own success. You have to renew your business model.

In a global market that is constantly evolving, you can’t expect “magic bullets” or “best practices”—or any stand-alone business philosophy that many books and gurus offer—to guide your company through good times and bad. Instead you need to take an active role in reviewing and retooling your strategies. You need to stop thinking “business as usual.” You need Business Model Renewal—a groundbreaking book that provides a language and multiple frameworks for how to think about and implement business model reinvention.

A full-range guide to synthesizing and applying the most up-to-date thinking in business today, Business Model Renewal challenges you to re-evaluate your methods, rethink your options, and reignite your organization. Constantly challenging the mindset of “tried and true” numbers-based solutions such as market share, financials, and metrics, Gorchels integrates both traditional concepts and cutting-edge ideas to avoid the usual “one size fits all” approach that can stifle a company’s growth. You’ll learn how to build a custom-made business model that encompasses the totality of how your company produces value—including design, infrastructure, culture, operations, and more. You’ll learn how to adapt to newest emerging technologies, how to cope with the biggest market fluctuations, how to serve the latest demographic shifts, and how to plan ahead for your company’s future.

Envisioning business model renewal efforts drives leaders and managers to deal with the ambiguity of future thinking. Shifts in technology, market needs, and competitive arenas can never be known precisely, but must nevertheless be anticipated. Scenario planning and other group-based, collaborative efforts to study the future are therefore necessary components of business model renewal. So, too, is corporate culture, decision making, business model portfolio design, and change management.

That’s why the frameworks in this book touch on all of these facets. Business Model Renewal won’t give you seven proven steps, five key principles, or even 10 irrefutable laws. But it will challenge you to do the hard work of broadening the perspectives of your firm, the ecosystem in which it exists, the role of your personal leadership, and the followership within your corporate culture.

About the Author

Linda Gorchels is a member of the Executive Education faculty in the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s School of Business. She is the award-winning author of The Product Manager’s Handbook, and has worked with organizations such as Trane Commercial Systems, GE Medical, Siemens, Metso Automation, Nokia, and J.F. Pearson, among others.