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Shadowing practice: What Is Strategy? It’s a Lot Simpler Than You Think

Listen to the line, then say it out loud
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  1. To many people, strategy is a little bit of a mystery.0:00
  2. Often we have a sense, in order to know what strategy is, you have to be super senior.0:02
  3. You have to do a lot of job experience.0:07
  4. It seems very complicated.0:09
  5. Nonsense.0:11
  6. Strategy is simple.0:12
  7. It's a plan to create value.0:13
  8. The way a company plans to create that value, that's the strategy of the company.0:16
  9. ["Street Life"] Of course, it's natural to look at financials.0:25
  10. What are your margins?0:30
  11. What's profitability?0:31
  12. What's the return and invest the capital?0:33
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  1. And that, of course, shows the result of strategy.0:35
  2. It's an endpoint.0:39
  3. It's a consequence.0:40
  4. It's not actually where we start.0:41
  5. Strategy is about looking forward, seeing the future, planning for the future.0:43
  6. We want to start with a sense of how much value do we create in the first place.0:48
  7. Value for customers, value for employees, and value for suppliers.0:53
  8. Value is the difference between willingness to pay and willingness to sell.0:59
  9. There's a really straightforward and simple way to show this in a figure.1:04
  10. The figure is called a value stick.1:09
  11. And literally imagine at the top we have willingness to pay, at the bottom we have willingness to sell, and the difference between the two is the value that the1:11
  12. company creates.1:20
  13. If I'm more successful, if I create more value, I can only do this in two ways, either by increasing willingness to pay or by decreasing willingness to sell.1:21
  14. Now you're gonna ask, okay, so what is willingness to pay?1:32
  15. What is willingness to sell?1:35
  16. Willingness to pay describes customers.1:37
  17. It's the most a customer would ever pay for a product or a service.1:39
  18. Charge me one cent more and I'm better off not buying.1:44
  19. Now, the company's not gonna give away its products, of course, and so we're charging a particular price.1:48
  20. The price has to be below willingness to pay, otherwise people will not buy.1:54
  21. The success for customers is just a difference between willingness to pay and price.1:59
  22. I don't know about you, I have a hard time waking up in the morning.2:04
  23. My willingness to pay for that first cup of coffee, seven, eight dollars easily.2:06
  24. I go to Dunkin' Donuts every day.2:11
  25. They sell me coffee for two dollars.2:14
  26. Big difference between my willingness to pay and the price.2:17
  27. There's a lot of value created for customers.2:20
  28. Customer delight, the difference between willingness to pay and price is significant.2:23
  29. Willingness to sell is a little less intuitive than willingness to pay.2:30
  30. Willingness to sell is the least amount of compensation that an employee would accept and still work for this particular company.2:35
  31. So think of a person trying to sell, I could sell my work to company A, I could sell my work to company B.2:44
  32. How do I choose between the two?2:51
  33. How fabulous is the job?2:54
  34. How interesting is it?2:55
  35. Will I like my colleagues?2:57
  36. Value for employees is the difference between compensation and my willingness to sell.2:58
  37. It's a measure of the quality between what the person is looking for in work and what the company can offer.3:05
  38. So total value created is the difference between willingness to pay and willingness to sell and then it gets split three ways.3:15
  39. Some of it goes to customers, that's the difference between willingness to pay and price.3:23
  40. Some of it goes to employees, that's the difference between willingness to sell and compensation and the middle wedge.3:27
  41. That's the margin of the company, that's financial success.3:34
  42. In the end, how profitable an organization is reflects the amount of overall value creation.3:39
  43. So one natural question is, what are the ways I can raise willingness to pay?3:48
  44. And there are really three buckets.3:54
  45. The first one is the quality of your product or your service.3:56
  46. Where quality can mean very different things to different people, but the higher the quality, more appealing the product, the more appealing the service, the higher is willingness to pay.3:59
  47. And then there are two different ways to also increase willingness to pay that are a little less obvious.4:09
  48. The first one is with the help of compliments.4:15
  49. A compliment is a product or a service that supports willingness to pay of something else.4:18
  50. Think razor, razor blade, think printer and cartridges, think espresso machines and espresso capsules.4:24
  51. And the third is network effects.4:34
  52. For some products in some situations, the more popular the product is, the more widespread its adoption, the greater my willingness to pay.4:36
  53. Social media is a great example.4:46
  54. If all my friends are on Instagram, oh, it's so much better to also be on Instagram.4:48
  55. My willingness to pay will increase as the adoption of Instagram increases.4:53
  56. There are really two ways to be more attractive in the market for talent.5:00
  57. The first one is, I just pay you more money.5:05
  58. The moment I pay you more money, of course I'm going to be more competitive in the marketplace for talent.5:07
  59. The second option that seems similar is, I make the job a better job.5:14
  60. I create more attractive working conditions.5:19
  61. Maybe I have a better training plan.5:22
  62. Maybe I have more generous promotion rules.5:24
  63. Maybe you can work three days from home.5:26
  64. Whenever I make the job a better job, willingness to sell is going to go down.5:29
  65. And so at the beginning, you might think these things are really the same.5:35
  66. If I pay more money, I create more value for my employees.5:38
  67. And if I make a job a better job, I lower willingness to sell.5:42
  68. And that does the same thing.5:46
  69. It creates more value, but there's a big difference.5:47
  70. If I pay more, that just shifts value from the company to the staff, to the employees.5:51
  71. There's no value created.5:59
  72. Value is just redistributed between the company and the people who work for the company.6:01
  73. If I make work more attractive, if the job is a better job, willingness to sell goes down, and that actually creates value.6:07
  74. Let's talk about a specific example.6:20
  75. You might know Best Buy, the electronics retailer in the United States.6:22
  76. And if you go back, say, 10 years or so, everybody, including myself, everybody was convinced that Best Buy was gonna go out of business.6:27
  77. Why?6:36
  78. Many other electronics retailers had gone out of business, and with roughly a thousand stores, it just seemed impossible to compete against Amazon.6:37
  79. At one point in time, Best Buy lost a billion dollars in a single quarter.6:47
  80. And then a new CEO comes in, Iber Sholeed.6:53
  81. And remember, strategy's not complicated.6:55
  82. It's all about either increasing willingness to pay or decreasing willingness to sell.6:58
  83. And that's exactly what he does.7:03
  84. Instead of building big distribution centers, big warehouses from which you ship online, he starts thinking about every store as a warehouse.7:05
  85. And they start shipping from each individual store, typically from a store that is just down the road from where you are.7:16
  86. We increase willingness to pay by having better shipping times.7:24
  87. And then a second idea has to do with the retail store environment.7:29
  88. He goes to Microsoft, he goes to Samsung, he goes to Lenovo, and he says, "'Well, you know, you can go down the Apple route "'and you can build really7:34
  89. beautiful, "'free -standing stores at millions and millions of dollars.7:43
  90. "'Or you can have a store in a store inside Best Buy "'where people are shopping for electronics products "'in the first place at a fraction of the cost, "'lowering7:48
  91. willingness to sell for the vendors to Best Buy.'" Now, what does it mean for employees?7:58
  92. Instead of selling innumerable products, now I'm dedicated to the store in a store that's the Microsoft store, or the store in a store that is the Sony store.8:04
  93. I know so much more about the products I have.8:15
  94. I can do a much better job helping customers figure out which products are exactly right for them.8:19
  95. My job is easier, I feel more successful, willingness to sell drops, and if you look at employee engagement surveys at Best Buy, they are at an all -time high8:25
  96. after these big changes.8:39
  97. So what did Best Buy do?8:42
  98. It increased customers' willingness to pay, and we have fewer pricing pressures.8:44
  99. Next, they lowered willingness to sell and costs fall for Best Buy.8:51
  100. The middle portion of the value stick, we have less pricing pressure, we have lower cost.8:57
  101. Not surprisingly, the company's more profitable.9:04
  102. They go from losing a billion dollars in a quarter to having a return on investor capital that exceeds 20%.9:07
  103. Amazing.9:14
  104. Why?9:16
  105. Because we started with ideas about how to create value.9:17
  106. Before we thought about how to capture a fraction of the value that we created.9:21

English Listening Practice with an American Business Lecture on Strategy

This clip is a single speaker from Harvard Business Review explaining what strategy actually is, a spoken lecture rather than a scene between two people. The speaker builds the idea of a value stick, willingness to pay and willingness to sell, at 175 words per minute, faster than most of the catalogue. The recording sits at B1, so the vocabulary is business focused, words like retailer, pricing and margins, but the sentences stay short and the delivery is steady.

The accent is American, which makes this a useful target for american accent training if you want to hear a natural business register delivered at real speed. Because it is one person working through a logical argument rather than a back and forth, you can isolate a single sentence, such as line seven, and repeat it before moving to the next, which is how this page is built for you to work through the clip.

English Shadowing Practice on the Value Stick Lines

The lines below carry the core of the argument, so getting them right trains pronunciation and vocabulary together, not just one or the other.

  • "It's a plan to create value." A short definition with three even beats, plan, create, value, and nothing to swallow between them, so it is a good line to check your stress against the speaker's.
  • "Now you're gonna ask, okay, so what is willingness to pay?" is one of the gonna reductions in this recording, folded into a fast run into "ask". Shadow it as one sound block rather than splitting it back into going to.
  • "I go to Dunkin' Donuts every day." A personal aside with plain, everyday vocabulary, a useful line for rhythm practice once the denser business sentences start to feel heavy.
  • "They sell me coffee for two dollars." pairs with the line above, plain enough to say fast and check your pace against the original without the terminology getting in the way.

How to Practise English Speaking Through This HBR Strategy Talk

Work the clip in this order rather than starting from the top and pushing through all 118 lines at once.

  • Start with line 7, "It's a plan to create value." Say it once at full speed, then slow it down to isolate each stressed word before speeding back up.
  • Move to line 26, the gonna line, and shadow it three times, then record yourself and compare against the audio, since this is where the pace jumps.
  • Use the coffee lines, 34 through 37, as everyday english conversation practice, since the vocabulary drops away from business terms for a moment and the sentences are shorter.
  • Once the individual lines feel comfortable, replay lines 21 through 25, the value stick explanation, as one connected block, since this is the passage the rest of the talk depends on.
  • Finish by saying line 7 again from memory, without the audio, to check whether the definition actually stuck or whether you were only echoing the sound.
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