Short interview excerpt in which Naomi Ballantyne explains that strategy should be thought of as a "place in the world", not a plan or incremental iteration. She applies this to life insurance, arguing the industry often favors shareholders and incumbents over customers; a customer-centric strategic position may require sacrificing short-term profit but yields competitive advantage.
A lot of people don't know what strategy means either. Even if they're in a strategic job, you know, chief strategy officer, they don't really understand what that means.
When you think about when someone says, I want a really robust strategy, I want something that's going to set us up and we can move towards, what does it look like?
Well, it looks like a place in the world. It doesn't look like a plan, and it doesn't look like an iteration of where you are today. So in life insurance, for me, there are things about this industry that are not good for the customer. They're good for the shareholders, and they're good for the people who run the businesses, but they're ultimately not the right thing for the customer. Our place in the world was to change that, to put the customer at the center of that conversation. It gives you a competitive advantage. Yes, you pay for it. You give away profit to get there. But no one can argue that you take a startup company and you turn it into the, you know, number two company and sell it for a billion dollars. That. That didn't work right.
