This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life)

by Seth Godin

Leverage in business works like this: Something is working, and you borrow some money to help it work louder, faster, or at more scale. You have a machine that improves efficiency. Borrow some money and buy a second machine. Now you have even more efficiency. Each strategy can be amplified with investment. So what’s the problem? Your competition is borrowing money too with the same idea you have—with this investment, we’ll be able to scale our strategy. Small leads are amplified because leaders can borrow more money. But when there are investors to pay back, nuance goes out the window. Employees get squeezed, and then customers do. It’s hard to hold back and bring a sensible approach to scale because your competitors are in a race to outdo you. This leads to Schumpeter’s creative destruction. Any strategy, scaled big enough, cannot be sustained, and it will be replaced by a new set of conditions, players, and rules. In other words: Every successful organization will fail unless it becomes something different before it does.