This executive’s problem was primarily organizational rather than rooted in product-market competition. Yet the kernel of strategy—a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action—applies to any complex setting. Here, as in so many situations, the required actions were not mysterious. The impediment was the hope that the pain of those actions could, somehow, be avoided. Indeed, we always hope that a brilliant insight or very clever design will allow us to accomplish several apparently conflicting objectives with a single stroke, and occasionally we are vouchsafed this kind of deliverance.
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