More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 19 - June 19, 2019
Trade-offs are the strategic equivalent of a fork in the road. If you take one path, you cannot simultaneously take the other.
If you have a strategy, you should be able to link it directly to your P&L.
Trade-offs are choices that make strategies sustainable because they are not easy to match or to neutralize.
When you try to offer something for everyone, you tend to relax the trade-offs that underpin your competitive advantage.
Good strategies depend on the connection among many things, on making interdependent choices.
company’s value proposition and each contributes incrementally
A common mistake in strategy is to choose the same core competences as everyone else in your industry.
Tailoring and trade-offs prevent existing rivals from copying a good strategy, either by straddling or repositioning.
Finally, fit explains how competitive advantage can be sustained against new entrants, even the most determined of them.
The five tests of a good strategy
Continuity of strategy does not mean that an organization should stand still. As long as there is stability in the core value proposition, there can, and should, be enormous innovation in how it’s delivered.
Great strategies are rarely, if ever, built on a particularly detailed or concrete prediction of the future.
Beyond this fundamental bet that the chosen needs will be enduring, strategy does not require what Porter calls “heroic predictions” about the future.
“‘That is what strategy is all about. It’s about a point of view about the future and then making decisions based on that. The worst thing you can do is not have a point of view, and not make decisions.’”
When you substitute flexibility for strategy, your organization never stands for anything or becomes good at anything.
Paradoxically, continuity of strategy actually improves an organization’s ability to adapt to changes and to innovate.
Capital markets have become toxic for strategy. The single-minded pursuit of shareholder value . . . has been enormously destructive for strategy and value creation.
How do you get everybody in the organization on the same page?
