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The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.
identifying the biggest challenges to forward progress and devising a coherent approach to overcoming them.
A good strategy does more than urge us forward toward a goal or vision. A good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them.
the greater the challenge, the more a good strategy focuses and coordinates efforts to achieve a powerful competitive punch or problem-solving effect.
Bad strategy tends to skip over pesky details such as problems. It ignores the power of choice and focus, trying instead to accommodate a multitude of conflicting demands and interests.
bad strategy covers up its failure to guide by embracing the language of broad goals, ambition, vision, and values.
Ambition is drive and zeal to excel. Determination is commitment and grit. Innovation is the discovery and engineering of new ways to do things. Inspirational leadership motivates people to sacrifice for their own and the common good.
strategy, responsive to innovation and ambition, selects the path, identifying how, why, and where leadership and determination are to be applied.
the term “strategy” should mean a cohesive response to an important challenge.
strategy is a coherent set of analyses, concepts, policies, arguments, and actions that respond to a high-stakes challenge.
A good strategy includes a set of coherent actions. They are not “implementation” details; they are the punch in the strategy. A strategy that fails to define a variety of plausible and feasible immediate actions is missing a critical component.
Strategy is about how an organization will move forward.
Doing strategy is figuring out how to advance the organization’s interests.
A good strategy has an essential logical structure that I call the kernel. The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action.
guiding policy specifies the approach to dealing with the obstacles called out in the diagnosis. It
Coherent actions are feasible coordinated policies, resource commitments, and actions designed to ...
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Leaders may create bad strategy by mistakenly treating strategy work as an exercise in goal setting rather than problem solving.
The most basic idea of strategy is the application of strength against weakness. Or, if you prefer, strength applied to the most promising opportunity.
The creation of new strengths through subtle shifts in viewpoint.
The first natural advantage of good strategy arises because other organizations often don’t have one. And because they don’t expect you to have one, either.
The power of Jobs’s strategy came from directly tackling the fundamental problem with a focused and coordinated set of actions.
He did not attack my argument. He didn’t agree with it, either. He just smiled and said, “I am going to wait for the next big thing.”
most organizations will not create focused strategies. Instead, they will generate laundry lists of desirable outcomes and, at the same time, ignore the need for genuine competence in coordinating and focusing their resources.
Good strategy requires leaders who are willing and able to say no to a wide variety of actions and interests. Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does.
Looking at things from a different or fresh perspective can reveal new realms of advantage and opportunity as well as weakness and threat.
“in dealing effectively with the other side, a nation seeks opportunities to use one or more distinctive competences in such a way as to develop competitive advantage—both in specific areas and overall.”
having a true competitive strategy meant engaging in actions that imposed exorbitant costs on the other side.
investing in technologies that were expensive to counter and where the counters did not add to Soviet offensive capabilities.
