Strategy Framework Maker (PESTLE, BCG & More)

About the Strategy Framework Maker (PESTLE, BCG & More)

Six frameworks that strategy courses, consultants and business plans use, in one editor beside the SWOT Analysis Maker and the Business Model Canvas Maker: PESTLE for the world outside the business, Porter’s Five Forces for the industry, the BCG growth-share matrix for a portfolio of products, the Ansoff matrix for ways to grow, VRIO for the resources that give an advantage, and McKinsey 7S for whether the organisation fits together. Each has short guidance and questions to ask, and its diagram draws itself as you type: the PESTLE grid, the five forces around the rivalry, a bubble chart for BCG, the Ansoff grid, the VRIO table and the 7S network.

The tool works out what each framework asks for: the BCG category of each product from its market growth and relative market share, the VRIO implication of each resource from the four questions, the Ansoff strategy of each initiative and the average strength of the five forces. Start from the example — a café on a busy corner — or a blank analysis, and keep up to twenty in this browser.

Without a pass, everything you type, the categories and the implications work in full and each diagram shows with a watermark; a Pro pass unlocks the slides (a 16:9 PDF with the source of every framework), the PNG of each diagram, the Markdown and copying it.

PESTLE

The CIPD’s PESTLE analysis factsheet describes PESTLE — political, economic, sociological, technological, legal and environmental — as a way to gather information about the outside factors that may affect an organisation’s decisions, so that it can make the most of opportunities and reduce threats; it lists strategic and business planning, marketing, product development and organisational change among its uses. The method is usually traced to Francis Aguilar’s Scanning the Business Environment. Note each point’s impact and whether it is an opportunity, a threat or both: the diagram shows high-impact points in bold and marks each kind with a colour.

Porter’s Five Forces

Michael Porter’s The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy (Harvard Business Review) argues that competition goes beyond the rivals already in an industry to four other forces: customers (buyers), suppliers, potential entrants and substitute products. Rate each force from very weak to very strong and note what drives it; the stronger the forces, the harder it is to earn high profits in the industry. The average strength the tool shows is a quick reading, not a score from Porter’s work: the drivers matter more than the number.

The BCG growth-share matrix

Bruce Henderson’s The Product Portfolio (Boston Consulting Group) sorts products by market share and market growth: high share and high growth are stars, high share and slow growth cash cows, which earn more cash than they need, low share and high growth question marks, which need more cash than they make, and low share and slow growth pets (often drawn as dogs). Relative market share is your share, or sales, divided by your largest competitor’s (by the next largest when you lead), so 1.0× means as big as the leader. The essay gives no fixed lines between high and low: set them here (10% growth and 1.0× to start). The chart follows the classic layout, with high share on the left and share on a log scale; bubble area shows revenue.

The Ansoff matrix

H. Igor Ansoff’s Strategies for Diversification (Harvard Business Review) sets out four ways to grow by whether the product and the market are existing or new: market penetration (existing products in existing markets), product development (new products for existing markets), market development (existing products in new markets) and diversification (new products in new markets). The further a move goes from what the business knows, the higher the risk.

VRIO

VRIO grew out of Jay Barney’s resource-based view of the firm. His paper Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage (Journal of Management) asks whether a resource is valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable and without equivalent substitutes; VRIO, the form most taught today, asks whether a resource or capability is valuable, rare and costly to imitate, and whether the firm is organised to use it. Note what each answer rests on (the diagram and the text keep it beside the resource). The tool asks the four questions in order and stops at the first “no”: not valuable — a competitive disadvantage; valuable but common — competitive parity; valuable and rare but easy to copy — a temporary advantage; all three but not organised to use it — an unused advantage; all four — a sustained competitive advantage.

McKinsey 7S

Robert Waterman, Thomas Peters and Julien Phillips’ Structure Is Not Organization90027-0) (Business Horizons) argues that structure is only one of seven factors that decide how well an organisation works and changes: strategy, structure, systems, shared values (called superordinate goals in the paper), style, staff and skills, which have to fit each other. Strategy, structure and systems are often called the “hard” elements and the other four the “soft” ones, with shared values at the centre. Write where each element is now, where it needs to be and what will move it there; the diagram links every element to every other, because a change in one affects the rest.

The slides and files

• Slides (PDF): 16:9 pages for a presentation — a title slide, one slide for each framework ticked “In the slides and the text”, each with its source, and a slide of sources.
• PNG: the diagram of the framework on screen, with its name, as a picture.
• Markdown: every framework in the slides as text, with tables and the source of each.
• Backup: the analysis as a small file you can open again here — your own data, always available.

Limitations

• Up to 10 points a PESTLE factor, 6 drivers a force, 12 BCG products, 16 Ansoff initiatives and 12 VRIO resources, and 20 analyses in this browser. Long lists are shortened on the diagrams (“+ 2 more”); the Markdown keeps everything.
• The tool works out the categories and implications from your answers; the judgement in the answers is yours. The frameworks describe a situation — they do not choose a strategy.
• The slides draw Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Vietnamese letters; text in other scripts shows as “?” there — the Markdown keeps it.
• Analyses are kept in this browser on this device: save a backup to move one to another device or to share it.

Privacy

On this device; its files download once

Everything happens in your browser. Your analyses are kept in this browser’s storage on this device and are never uploaded.