Many organisations believe they are thinking strategically, when in reality they are simply refining their existing operations. This is a dangerous blind spot that Rita McGrath highlighted brilliantly when she declared “Most strategic planning exercises are budgeting in a Halloween costume.”
This article is part of our series Where Are Your Growth Blind Spots?, where we explore the often-overlooked barriers that hinder growth. Drawing from Vibrance’s Growth Orienteering strategic approach, we aim to help leaders uncover hidden obstacles and unlock their organisation’s full growth potential.
In this article, we focus on the strategy blind spot, a common challenge for organisations that use a strategic process overly focused on incremental improvements to their core business, while neglecting the wider spectrum of growth possibilities.
The Strategy Blind Spot
Leaders today operate in an environment of relentless pressure: quarterly targets, operational challenges, and the need to keep the core business running smoothly on a tight budget. In such an environment, it’s no surprise that strategic conversations often default to what feels most urgent, i.e. problem-solving or refining existing operations.
Against this backdrop, focusing on the core business is by no means a mistake. It’s often a necessity. With limited time and resources, leaders need to prioritise the areas that generate quick returns. However, this focus often comes at the expense of exploring new opportunities that would bear fruits in the mid to long-term. Over time, an organisation that once thrived may find itself overly reliant on a plateaued or declining core business, making it vulnerable to stagnation and disruption.
Leaders are also human and as such they often default to what they can plan and control, i.e. optimising existing operations. And in the words of another strategy guru, Roger Martin, who highlighted this common pitfall, “A plan is not a strategy.” Often, a plan focusing on getting better at what a company does today can hide the true strategic challenge that would need to be resolved for future success in a fast-changing business environment.
Poor strategic processes often manifest as:
Strategic discussions lacking boldness, defaulting to ‘business as usual’ and budgeting.
Leaders focusing too narrowly on short-term wins, leaving longer-term opportunities unexplored.
Resource allocation skewed toward the core business, with minimal investment in adjacent or transformative ventures.
The result? Organisations become overly reliant on the core, leaving themselves vulnerable to stagnation, disruption, and a lack of resilience in the face of changing market dynamics.
To not fall into the trap of a budgeting exercise masquerading as strategy, we need to enable a different strategic process and conversation.
The Growth Map: A Tool to Explore Strategic Options
A tool can unlock better conversations, and the Growth Map is the strategy tool we use in Growth Orienteering to help leaders systematically explore opportunities across nine distinct “terrains” by combining the dimensions of Where (“Core”, “Adjacent”, “New”) and How (“Build”, “Partner”, “Buy”).
The Growth Map ensures that strategic conversations don’t remain overly anchored in the core. Instead, it encourages leaders to consider a broader range of possibilities, from strengthening core operations to exploring new markets or building transformative business models.
Case Study: Apple's Growth Mastery in Last Decade
Like any company, Apple had to face critical strategic decisions about how much to invest in its core business versus how much to explore new frontiers. Its ability to strike a balance - continuing to innovate within its core while strategically expanding into adjacent and new markets - has been key to its sustained growth over the last decade.
Crucially, Apple has not only explored Where to grow (“Core”, “Adjacent”, and “New” dimensions) but also How to grow, strategically leveraging “Build”, “Partner”, or “Buy” approaches depending on the context. This multifaceted strategy has helped them build a powerful product and service ecosystem that reinforces customer loyalty and drives significant business impact.
Let's review some of Apple's bold strategic moves from the last 10 years in chronological order:
Buy-Adjacent: The acquisition of Beats Electronics on August 1, 2014, brought premium audio products into Apple’s ecosystem.
Partner-Adjacent: Apple Pay, launched on October 20, 2014, in partnership with major banks and payment networks, expanded Apple’s reach into financial services while enhancing the iPhone’s utility.
Build-Adjacent: The launch of the Apple Watch on April 24, 2015, Apple Music on June 30, 2015, and AirPods on December 13, 2016, opened new product categories that seamlessly integrate with the iPhone, further strengthening Apple’s ecosystem.
Build-Core: Apple continuously enhanced its core iPhone product with features like Face ID (introduced with the iPhone X on November 3, 2017).
Buy-Core: Shazam was acquired by Apple in 2018 to enhance Apple Music, improving song identification features and user experience.
Build-New: Apple TV+, launched on November 1, 2019, positioned Apple as a competitor in the streaming market, with exclusive shows like Ted Lasso and The Morning Show.
Build-Core: Apple silicon was introduced in 2020 and the first Macs featuring these chips were released in November 2020, marking the beginning of a transition away from Intel processors.
Partner-Adjacent: Apple and Paramount entered a bundling partnership to offer combined subscriptions of Apple TV+ and Paramount+, aiming to enhance content offerings and compete more effectively in the streaming market.
Build-New: On June 5, 2023, Apple unveiled the Apple Vision Pro, an augmented reality (AR) headset that marked the company's entry into spatial computing, without commercial success though.
Build-Core: The introduction of Apple Intelligence on October 4, 2024, showcased Apple's commitment to integrating advanced artificial intelligence features across its ecosystem. This initiative enhanced user experiences on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, offering more personalized and efficient interactions.
Impact on Revenue Growth
As we can see, Apple’s growth wasn’t just the result of focusing on its core business: it was achieved by balancing core innovation with strategic expansion into adjacent and new markets through internal developments, new key partnerships and acquisitions. While Apple continued to enhance the iPhone and Mac, it also ventured into wearables, financial services, entertainment, and artificial intelligence, ensuring long-term resilience and diversification.
Over the last decade, this approach has more than doubled Apple’s revenue, growing from $182.80 billion in 2014 to $391.04 billion in 2024, reflecting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 8%. This substantial growth underscores the power of a strategic approach that doesn’t just optimise the present but actively builds the future.
Overcoming the Strategy Blind Spot
The strategy blind spot is one of the most common obstacles to sustained growth. When organisations default to familiar approaches and a constrained strategic process, they risk stagnation and miss opportunities for transformation.
In contrast, organisations that deliberately expand their strategic process to explore all possible growth terrains can unlock new growth possibilities and build resilience against market disruption. Tools like the Growth Map empower leaders to explore all growth options systematically, not only by considering where to grow - “Core”, “Adjacent”, or “New” - but also by leveraging different growth approaches - “Build”, “Partner”, or “Buy”. This opens a more dynamic, exhaustive strategic process that enables leaders to think strategically beyond their core and unlock their organisation’s full growth potential.
Where does your strategy focus today? Are you too anchored in the core? If so, take the first step to overcoming the strategy blind spot: expand your strategic horizons with the Growth Map, explore all terrains, and embrace the full spectrum of growth opportunities.
About Fred
Executive advisor on strategy and innovation. Co-author of The Invincible Company, a guide to building resilience in organisations through corporate innovation. The book was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Strategy Award in 2021.
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