Alexander Osterwalder

… that moment when one of your mentors and role models sends you a picture of your book(s).

🙏 Steve Blank for your continuous inspiration, advice, and friendship!

https://lnkd.in/ebFr9zt

*** AI Business Model Disruption ***

I've been working on strategy & AI disruption for C-suite leadership meetings quite a bit this year. It's been fun helping CEOs and their teams assess AI disruption risk and develop strategy accordingly. Exciting & disruptive times!

Attached a quick sketch to highlight the 4 areas of AI business model disruption: 1) value model
2) delivery model
3) production model
4) economic model

Have you assessed your business model? Is your strategy fit for AI disruption?

6 Value Proposition Patterns

Over the last week, Yves Pigneur and I worked on a first beta version of value proposition patterns and flavors. We’ll share them in our upcoming Strategyzer Masterclass on value propositions that win in the market.

I’m excited to kick off the Masterclass tomorrow with a 1-hour live session. Participants and teams will then work through guided pre-work with the Masterclass playbook to prepare for Friday’s remote workshop.

After the first workshop, teams will continue refining their value propositions with async work in the playbook before we meet again the following week for a second remote workshop.

I’m curious to see how much participants evolve their value propositions over two weeks of structured work, experimentation, and feedback. Let's get started!

🆘 Building speed is not learning speed 🆘

Steve Blank just shared a sharp observation from his Stanford class.

AI now makes it incredibly fast and cheap to build. That speed pulls teams straight into execution. But many lose sight of the real goal.

The goal is not to build. The goal is to find a business model that works and scales.

As Steve puts it:
“Teams were so overwhelmed with so much information from the AI tools that they lost sight of the goal of customer development.”

I like to think in terms of a spotlight.

Strong teams point that light at customer jobs, pains, and gains first. That creates a map of the terrain and shows which road to explore.

When teams jump into building, they move the spotlight randomly. They don’t know where they stand, and they don’t see the cliff ahead.

AI gives you power & speed, but a disciplined approach gives you direction.

The best teams ask what they need to learn next, then design experiments to test it. They don’t just build faster. They learn faster.

👉 Join our Masterclass Value Propositions that Win in the Market. We show you step by step how to use the power of AI to design, test, and iterate value propositions that customers actually want.

Adoption of New Value Propositions

I’m prepping the playbook for tomorrow’s second workshop of our Masterclass on Value Propositions that Win in the Market.

We’ll end the workshop with Bobby Moesta & Chris Spiek's Forces Diagram. I shamelessly renamed it the Forces of Adoption Framework (pardon me Bob & Chris 🙏).

This tool gets way too little attention. It’s a gem for thinking through adoption.

Customers don’t simply “switch” because something is better. They experience competing forces:

1. Push from the current situation
2. Pull toward a new solution
3. Habits and inertia that keep them stuck
4. Anxiety about change

The framework makes these forces visible. It helps teams understand why adoption happens… or why it doesn’t.

Hopefully I’ll get some bandwidth this summer to turn this into a full playbook and add it to our growing Strategyzer Playbook Library subscription.

* Your Leadership Team Was Built to Execute. Can It Also Explore? *

Last summer I worked with the senior leadership team (SLT) of a Fortune 500 company to understand why their adjacency bets weren't scaling.

That work led to an introduction to the CEO of a global hospitality brand.

This summer we're helping their leadership team build something many organizations struggle with: the ability to explore while continuing to exploit an already successful core business.

That's real leadership.

Interestingly, I'm involved with three SLTs at the moment to help them to start or unlock exploration.

Most executive teams have spent decades becoming world-class operators. Very few have built the mindset, governance, and management system required to repeatedly create new growth engines and explore adjacencies.

Here's the workshop playbook we're running on the Strategyzer platform:

1) Build the Explore–Exploit Mindset
2) Prototype a New Value Proposition & Business Model
3) Map Synergies & Friction with the Core & Extract Key Hypotheses
4) Design Explore Governance & Portfolio Management
5) Kickstarting Change towards an Exploration Mindset

Exploration isn't about brainstorming more ideas.

It's about building a repeatable management system for creating the next generation of growth.

What's the biggest obstacle preventing your leadership team from exploring while executing?

Clarity. Decisions. Action.

That’s becoming our equivalent of “just do it” at Strategyzer.

We’re currently pivoting our value proposition toward playbooks. Over the years we learned that most teams don’t fail because they lack projects or urgency. They fail because they lack clarity, don’t make aligned decisions, or jump into action before creating alignment and clarity.

Our playbooks are designed to fix exactly that.

They create clarity through guided steps, visual tools, and collaborative workspaces. They help teams make decisions faster and move to implementation with confidence.

No endless conversations going in circles.
No ambiguity about next steps.
No actions without alignment and clarity.

Just clarity. Decisions. Action.

Helping Senior Leadership Teams Explore Growth

This summer, I’m running workshops with three senior leadership teams to help them kickstart or boost growth and explore new arenas. All of them are iconic brands.

I always start with Explore vs. Exploit. While my deck is quite refined by now, I still try to simplify certain slides. This is one of them:

UNCERTAINTY
Explore: experiment & iterate.
Exploit: analyze & plan.

INVESTMENTS
Explore: make small bets and increase with evidence.
Exploit: make large bets with expected returns.

DECISIONS
Explore: what did we learn — continue, pivot or stop?
Exploit: are we on plan — time, budget, results?

On LinkedIn, people often suggest adding more to these three points. The topics are always relevant, but I believe the less I show, the more leaders will retain.

This slide has served me incredibly well over the last couple of years. People always pull out their phones.

Such a simple distinction, but such different leadership practices.

And too often, we manage Explore like Exploit. That’s where growth gets killed.
This message lands every time. Without exception.