• Themes: Diversification; Why and how?
• Concepts/vision: Diversification involves change; diversification is deliberate, controlled change. Diversification is – at a basic level – a response to change and possibility; diversification reflects, creates, and generates opportunities. At a higher level, diversification – or, more accurately, the ability to diversify product and service offerings in accordance with the increasingly high and particular demands of an increasingly savvy and enabled customer – is a critical competitive competence.
• Message: Diversification is a strength, so is not to be feared but embraced; diversification can have several meanings, but all are positive (for us, naturally).

You might shudder when you hear the word “diversification”. I forgive you if you do.1 The history of business is littered with case studies of brands who diversified and crashed soon after. They undermined their core products. They changed them and the public turned away. They went into new territory and found themselves unwelcome. They left behind what they did best. They tried to be something that in their DNA they weren’t. They changed their famous formula, or they redesigned their iconic logo, or they abandoned their most faithful demographic, and disaster followed.2

Companies should stick to what they do well,3 you might think, and they better not bet their future on anything that risks the name or flagship product of the brand. We know these stories, and we are not about to make the same mistakes. That is because, to us, “diversification” means new markets, new products done well, new families of product that complement our best performers, and new services that support those already in place or offer more. Diversification means converting products and services that were once strangers to our company into a new stock-in-trade that expands and enhances our success stories. 

There is risk, of course. Risk is involved whenever a company departs from its traditional lines to provide a different kind of product. Venturing brings it into new markets that may be dominated by strong competitors. But our diversification is controlled, incremental, and flexible. 

Yes, diversification is newness, but not for its own sake. Yes, it is about new technologies, new solutions, new suppliers, new retailers, new knowledge, new strategic alliances, new business units, new mergers and acquisitions, and new research and development projects - both blue sky and real-world. Diversification entails all these, but in essence, diversification is simple. 

We must always think about diversification as agile adaptation. With this translation in mind, diversification becomes natural and inevitable. Diversification becomes what we want to do proactively, rather than what we have to do retroactively. More meaningfully, our ability to diversify has become a competitive asset, a profit-driving capability. This is how we need to see diversification. Diversification is not about undoing what we do, or unpicking what we have put together, or moving away from what brings us results time after time, in market after market. Not at all. 

Diversification brings change sometimes, and with those changes come challenges, and with those challenges come solutions, of course. Since its inception, our company has been all about solutions. But more about that later.4 

What we need to think about now are some of the changes that may be difficult for you to adapt to.

There will be strategic closures. Some Large Business Units and Small Business Units will be closing, restructuring, merging, or scaling back. But lessons learned will not be lost. In fact, no BU has ever failed in this company. We never see it like that. Even those BUs that did not meet their projected returns over the last six years produced valuable knowhow that is being injected elsewhere into the system, for the benefit and improvement of the whole organisation. Whatever BU you belong to, your work has been fruitful. We will be preserving, transferring, and applying your market knowledge, your market research methods, your ways of interacting with local partners and sharing local intelligence. We will be preserving, transferring, and applying your knowhow concerning local operations, marketing technique, and essential details about downstream capabilities that we would not have, were it not for your achievements. And while we think about scaling back in some areas, we make plans to increase our efforts in others. 

Our best performing Business Units – whatever their size and wherever they are located – will be enlarged and enriched. They will benefit from a tactical reallocation of resources and additional funding, to capitalise on proven-good markets with relevant products, to build on established successes, and to continue to mine those deep, fertile markets with new and diverse introductions. We will be focusing concertedly on maintaining strength in already robust, opportunity-rich areas. We will learn how to do even better what we already do brilliantly, and we will continue to utilise the lessons gained in our successes to support other Business Units in regions where returns have been more modest. This way we strengthen what is already strong, and we strengthen what can be made stronger. Does this sound like the “diversification” that you have heard about? Do these sound like the kind of activities that you should be afraid of?5

So is this what “diversification” means? Well, yes, and more. It means a great deal – both for our customers and for us. 

For us, it means better solutions through better designs and better operations: greater material savings, less packaging, shorter storage times. Diversification means greater efficiencies, lower non-essential material usage, faster distribution and manufacturing, leaner and greener processes, and a reduction in waste of all kinds. 

For our customers, diversification means better solutions in the form of new products and services, but that is not all. That is just the beginning. To our customers, we will be delivering the same or a better standard and quality of products and services; bringing better, more useful, more usable iterations of their most valued products and services to market, as and when customers require them, in forms that will delight and enable them. To our customers, we will bring our highly advanced, ever-improving upstream competences to bear on their increasingly sophisticated needs and preferences. In fact, all our downstream partners will be serviced more sensitively and selectively, responsibly and responsively. And in this way, not only will we match demand and supply with a never-before-seen degree of fidelity, but we will also understand our customers’ and partners’ needs and preferences in unmatched high resolution – and deliver accordingly. So why do we diversify? I think that by now you have a very good idea.6

We diversify not for the sake of diversification, not to follow others, not to simply use the term in our publicity. We diversify not because our core products and services are failing – because they aren’t failing, and they never have. In fact, they continue to succeed, because diversification supports them. Diversification brings additional qualities that make our core products and services inimitable and non-substitutable. We diversify in order to support and improve our core offerings, making them better still, facilitating their users to get more than ever from them, more quickly, cheaply, and easily. We diversify because we seek new applications for exciting new technologies that will enable their users in powerful ways – new and novel. We diversify because we know how to put capabilities into waiting hands that are eager to excel. We diversify because we have developed technologies that can be integrated into existing products, creating new efficiencies and applications, as well as valuable productivity gains. We diversify because we have tremendous tools to offer our customers in both mature and growing markets. 

Whenever we can find gaps that we believe we can fill, we will research, we will experiment, we will supply, and we will engage our customers. Wherever our customers are, we will reach them, we will learn from them, we will equip them, and we will all benefit. 

In an increasingly technical and testing, communicative and creative world, we will continue to enable our customers. Our ability to diversify, learn from our successes and failures, share best practice across languages, cultures, sectors, regions, and products and services makes us what we are, which is a great player, a great source of innovative, intelligent 21st century technology solutions. 

This is how we diversify:7

We are agile while others are rigid; we are ambidextrous while others are one-handed; we are listening while others are making noise; we are moving while others are static; we are driving change as much as we are responding to change.8 And… 

Really importantly, we are addressing actual, real-time customer needs as much as we are developing technologies whose potential is not yet fully known. We are exploring “blue-sky” possibilities for tomorrow’s jobs while also bringing cutting-edge “real world” tools to our customers today – and our customers are ever more capable because of those tools. 

For us, diversification is not merely just another competence – we have plenty of those; it is a competence that our customer has grown to expect. The world looks to us for inspiration, as much as it does for practical solutions. We deliver both. Diversification is, for us, a mainstay of our competitive power. Diversification is, for our customers, a source of expanding capability. As their needs diversify, so do our products and services. 

Markets change; we change too, but not reactively or passively: we play a vital part in the changing of markets because markets evolve. We understand and we accept that we cannot and should not stand still while our customers’ wants and needs grow ever more sophisticated. In fact, we should relish this progress – after all, we encourage it. Fortunately, and very deliberately, we are well configured to grow more sophisticated alongside our customers. 

Companies should stick to what they do well, you might think, and I would agree with you – because at Company X, we do diversification exceedingly well.

1. In a long and serious speech like this, any brief opportunity to express empathy/pathos should be taken. 
2. Names need not be named. We all know the case studies. This section is generic narrative. It is an opening that serves as reassurance more than new information. Management understands that “diversification” is a loaded term. 
3. Repeated at the end. 
4. This speech features many transitions. Too many transitions makes a speech excessivley self-referential, which is not good. The audience isn’t there to hear about the speech. Transitions function to smooth the flow of the speech, not to get in the way of the message. Much of what follows is instructional as well as infomational. Some listeners may be unsure what practical activities are entailed in “diversification”. There are areas of repetition too. Some aspects of this speech need to be remembered more than others, and the repetition is intended to drive home those messages.
5. Informal rhetorical questions that reassure and lead into what follows, creating a positive transition. 
6. Leading transition. 
7. Another leading, priming transition. 
8. This is what I call the “false crescendo”. The speech appears to be summing up, but more is to follow. The list of parallelisms and contradictions is strong. The audience will be expecting the speech to end on this high note. When using the false crescendo, the writer must take care to not let the speech sink and end in an anticlimax.