Starting this post on a lighter note, I am reminded of a quote written by one of my friends on FaceBook – ‘Creativity is all about hiding the sources’ 😉 , but letting that quote be useful for other purposes I would confess that this post is inspired by a recent article by a strategy guru – Kaihan Krippendorf. (you may Google about him and find out more, it will be worth it).

Kaihan sends a weekly mailer to his subscribers where he provides an insight on his first hand experiences from all possible fields of life, and then gives an insight which can be re-used in a business environment. His interpretations and business lessons are usually good enough to be brought into practice.

So this week Kaihan has written about his experience of unlearning things we have studied at our B-school and develop a new approach to strategizing things using Wayfair’s model of success (success because they just got funded). Wayfair took a step towards short-term success and then one fine day aggregated all those small success units into one (almost after 9 years), they didn’t raise capital (because that would have limited their own vision in lieu of the investors money), and they didn’t even listen to what market was saying (or else they would have certainly not invested in dot com companies during the dot com bubble burst). They went against the tide, did things with a small-term vision and only followed their vision to achieve success. Kaihan summarizes the path chosen by Wayfair in the following steps:

#1. Pursue short-term opportunities, not a grand vision

#2. Don’t raise capital

#3. Ignore the market 

So what does it mean? Well, I see this Kaihan’s article and suggestion in a different stride – This is a unique strategy which wants to create value through different route – Create smaller units of armies and deploy them at several strategic important points – something which was done by war strategists. This certainly is not a short-term strategy, instead this is a delayed long-term strategy.

My interpretation of Wayfair’s strategy is as below:

#1. Create multiple small units of business models and concentrate on several successful areas.

#2. Since the units are small, it will have agility and flexibility to experiment and keep the costs lower. It also safeguards against any possibility of a severe loss in a single go.

#3. Combine the units when the proof of concept has been achieved and the operations have been stabilized.

#4. What you get has a value more than the sum of its parts 🙂

Thats a grand strategy based on multiple short-term strategic units 🙂

(you may read Kaihan’s blogs here – http://kaihan.net/blog_nav.html)