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March 17 - April 17, 2022
a talented leader identifies the one or two critical issues in the situation—the pivot points that can multiply the effectiveness of effort—and then focuses and concentrates action and resources on them.
Strategy is about how an organization will move forward. Doing strategy is figuring out how to advance the organization’s interests.
Not necessarily the first mover, but the first to get it right.
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.
use your relative advantages to impose out-of-proportion costs on the opposition and complicate his problem of competing with you.
When you cannot define the challenge, you cannot evaluate a strategy or improve it.
Bad strategy is long on goals and short on policy or action. It assumes that goals are all you need. It puts forward strategic objectives that are incoherent and, sometimes, totally impracticable. It uses high-sounding words and phrases to hide these failings.
A hallmark of true expertise and insight is making a complex subject understandable.
a clear-sighted recognition of the nature of the challenge.
The job of the leader is also to create the conditions that will make that push effective, to have a strategy worthy of the effort called upon.
leaders must identify the critical obstacles to forward progress and then develop a coherent approach to overcoming them.
changes don’t come along in nice annual packages.
Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes.
A good strategy defines a critical challenge.
When a leader characterizes the challenge as underperformance, it sets the stage for bad strategy. Underperformance is a result. The true challenges are the reasons for the underperformance.
bad strategy is the active avoidance of the hard work of crafting a good strategy.
Only the prospect of choice inspires peoples’ best arguments about the pluses of their own proposals and the negatives of others’.
Strategy is scarcity’s child and to have a strategy, rather than vague aspirations, is to choose one path and eschew others.
There may be talk about focusing on this or pushing on that, but at the end of the day no one wants to change what they are doing very much.
the transformational leader (1) develops or has a vision, (2) inspires people to sacrifice (change) for the good of the organization, and (3) empowers people to accomplish the vision.
Strategy is the craft of figuring out which purposes are both worth pursuing and capable of being accomplished.
To achieve great ends, charisma and visionary leadership must almost always be joined with a careful attention to obstacles and action,
explains the nature of the challenge.
overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis.
actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy.
obstacles imposed by its own outdated routines, bureaucracy, pools of entrenched interests, lack of cooperation across units, and plain-old bad management.
A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.
It is “guiding” because it channels action in certain directions without defining exactly what shall be done.
Good guiding policies are not goals or visions or images of desirable end states. Rather, they define a method of grappling with the situation and ruling out a vast array of possible actions.
Good strategy is not just “what” you are trying to do. It is also “why” and “how” you are doing it.
A strategy coordinates action to address a specific challenge. It is not defined by the pay grade of the person authorizing the action.
Good strategy and good organization lie in specializing on the right activities and imposing only the essential amount of coordination.
That is the power of concentration—of choosing an objective that can be decisively affected by the resources at hand.
every organization faces a situation where the full complexity and ambiguity of the situation is daunting. An important duty of any leader is to absorb a large part of that complexity and ambiguity, passing on to the organization a simpler problem—one that is solvable.
The proximate objective is guided by forecasts of the future, but the more uncertain the future, the more its essential logic is that of “taking a strong position and creating options,” not of looking far ahead.
To concentrate on an objective—to make it a priority—necessarily assumes that many other important things will be taken care of.
winging it is not a strategy.
for a master strategist is a designer.
Business and corporate strategy deal with large-scale design-type problems.
performance is the joint outcome of capability and clever design.
the greater the competitive challenge, the greater the need for the clever, tight integration of resources and actions.
Good strategy is design, and design is about fitting various pieces together so they work as a coherent whole.
“By providing more value you avoid being a commodity.
increasing value requires a strategy for progress on at least one of four different fronts:
strengthening the isolating mechanisms that block easy replication and imitation by competitors.
improvements come from reexamining the details of how work is done, not just from cost controls or incentives.
A brand’s value comes from guaranteeing certain characteristics of the product.
The first step in breaking organizational culture inertia is simplification.
In creating strategy, it is often important to take on the viewpoints of others, seeing how the situation looks to a rival or to a customer.
In the same way, a good business strategy deals with the edge between the known and the unknown. Again, it is competition with others that pushes us to edges of knowledge.
