Outthinker List: Learning from Urban Outfitters
Our next live session is dedicated to the Outthinker List and a key addition to it that's both old and completely new in the strategy conversation.
We're still working hard on the Outthinker List: a collection of fewer than 50 companies that have significantly outperformed their peers in the last five years. We already introduced the first set of cases—Celestica, Sprouts Farmers Market, and Chipotle—and we'll now share the refined and edited scripts we’re developing to bring these examples to life.
The real focus of this event lies in our next featured case: Urban Outfitters.
Urban Outfitters holds a special place in the Outthinker story. It was one of the original cases we used to introduce and teach the 9P model. For years, it served as the most vivid illustration of how each of the Ps differs and how they work together. However, when the company’s performance flattened—solid but average—we retired the case from our toolkit.
That is now changing. Urban Outfitters is back among the top-performing clothing retailers, and they’ve done it by innovating with a new business model. This opens the door for us to reintroduce Urban Outfitters—not only as a classic teaching tool for the 9Ps, but also as a case that highlights the opportunities and challenges of business model innovation itself.
In this session, we will:
Revisit the original framing of Urban Outfitters as a core 9Ps teaching case.
Explore the company’s new business model innovation and how it connects to the Outthinker process.
Discuss which stratagems this case can bring to life, including “To catch something, let it go,” “Be good,” and “Coordinate the uncoordinated.”
Begin designing a one-day deep-dive course on the 9Ps using Urban Outfitters as the central case, complete with a newly developed, Harvard Business School–style teaching note that any of us could use with clients.
We’ll also review the remaining companies on the Outthinker List and align on which cases to prioritize building out next.
As always, this collaborative session will provide a space for us to learn from one another, sharpen our tools, and enhance our collective ability to facilitate strategic conversations that open up new possibilities for our clients.