Why your portfolio moves slower than the market (and what to do about it).
The world around you is changing fast. New business models are being launched, established players are disappearing, and the rules of the game in your industry are shifting. But most organizations aren't moving at the same pace: their portfolios are designed for a world of predictability, optimized for efficiency, not agility.
The dilemma every leader faces
As a CEO, innovation director or strategist you live in two realities at once: keeping the business running that generates profit today while building what will matter tomorrow. Because if you don't, you become Nokia, Kodak or Blockbuster. This is the efficiency-innovation paradox: the skills, systems and mindsets that make your core successful are exactly the things that strangle new initiatives. And yet you must manage both worlds at the same time.
Why this is urgent now
Three forces turn portfolio management from a strategic option into a survival requirement. AI is rewriting the competitive rules, with new players entering markets with smarter, faster, cheaper models. Sustainability has shifted from CSR footnote to fundamental requirement demanded by customers, investors, regulators and talent. And market entry time has collapsed: a startup can enter your market in months with cloud infrastructure, platform economics and viral growth.
The cost of a slow portfolio
Struggling organizations show the same patterns: 90% of budget, people and attention stuck in business-as-usual; dozens of innovation initiatives that never scale beyond pilots; strategic fragmentation with overlapping investments and empty white spaces; and late market response, playing catch-up instead of defining the game. The result: sliding unnoticed from market leader to follower to irrelevant.
The solution: portfolio management as a discipline
The best organizations treat their portfolio of business models like an investor manages a financial portfolio: with intention, discipline and a systematic approach built on three questions: Where do we invest? What do we grow? What do we stop? Most organizations do this ad hoc, without a system, shared language or clear criteria, so decisions are driven by politics, sentiment or whoever shouts loudest.
Two worlds, one portfolio
The key is recognizing you must manage two fundamentally different worlds. Execute is where you run proven business models: efficiency, profitability, scale, predictability. Search is where you explore new ones: experimentation, learning, high uncertainty, fast failure. Treat search initiatives with an execute mindset and you kill promising innovations because 'the business case doesn't add up'; treat execute with a search mindset and you create chaos where stability is needed.
Ideas intoaction.
Explore the possibilities with Patrick van der Pijl and the BMI team. Every big shift starts with a conversation.