More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
tendency is easy to see in others although we are prone to blindness when we do it ourselves.
I too was guilty of the same too-little-too-late syndrome.
We even know what we should be doing. But we don’t trust our instincts or don’t act on them early enough to take advantage of the benign business bubble.
We must discipline ourselves to overcome our tendency to do too little too late.
The fundamental implication of this model was—and is—that the player with the largest share of a horizontal layer is the one who wins.
it reinforced our belief in the significance of compatibility with all of the rest of the horizontal layers and provided further encouragement for our drive toward high volume and low cost in our microprocessor business: toward improving our scale and scope.
importance of scale and scope implicit in the horizontal model.
You must force yourself to commit your thoughts to paper.
an equivalent diagram
of an industry be extremely helpful? So develop one.
you need to experiment with filling in the details of the new industry structure.
To make it through the valley of death successfully, your first task is to form a mental image of what the company should look like when you get to the other side.
“Intel, the microcomputer company,”
The phrase didn’t say anything about semiconductors, it didn’t say anything about memories.
What you’re trying to do is capture the essence of the company and the focus of its business.
yet that can only be done if you also undertake to define what the company will not be.
Getting through strategic inflection points represents a fundamental transformation of your company from what you were to what you will be.
Be clear in this but be realistic also. Don’t compromise and don’t kid yourself. If you are describing a purpose that deep down you know you can’t achieve, you are dooming your chances of climbing out of the valley of death.
the key activity that’s required in the course of transforming an organization is a
wholesale shifting of resources from what was appropriate for the old idea of the business to what is appropriate for the new.
I realized that I needed to learn more about the software world.
I set out to visit heads of software companies. I called them up one at a time, made appointments, met with them and asked them to talk to me about their business—as it were, to teach me.
was aided by the fact that Intel is a schoolish company, where it’s perfectly respectable for a senior person with twenty years of experience to take some time, buckle down and learn a whole new set of skills.)
learning built into Intel's culture
The discipline of redeployment is needed in spades when it comes to your personal time.
Habit 1,2,3 to be proactive, identify goals, and manage quadrant 2 activities to achieve those goals
the inevitable counterpart is that you’re subtracting from someplace else. You’re taking something away: production resources, managerial resources or your own time.
One more word about your own time: if you’re in a leadership position, how you spend your time has enormous symbolic value. It will communicate what’s important or what isn’t far more powerfully than all the speeches you can give.
Assigning or reassigning resources in order to pursue a strategic goal is an example of what I call strategic action.
Strategic plans are statements of what we intend to do.
Strategic actions are steps we have already taken or are taking which suggest our longer-term intent.
Strategic actions are conc...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
While strategic plans are abstract and are usually couched in language that has no concrete meaning except to the company’s management,
Strategic plans deal with events that are so far in the future that they have little relevance to what you actually have to do today. So they don’t command true attention.
Strategic actions, however, take place in the present.
That’s why I think the most effective way to transform a company is through a series of incremental changes that are consistent with a clearly articulated end result.
The timing of the transfer of resources from the old to the new has to be done with this crucial balance in mind.
This timing dilemma is illustrated below.
When is the time right? When the momentum of your existing strategy is still positive, your business is still growing, your customers and complementors still think highly of you yet there’s enough evidence of blips on your radar screen to warrant, at a minimum, exploring their significance. If your exploration confirms that they are real and are gaining, shift more resources on to them.
Your tendency will almost always be to wait too long.
greater risk of getting caught up in the dangers of the “first instantiation,”
The early movers are the only companies that have the potential to affect the structure of the industry and to define how the game is played by others.
Mark Twain
“Put all of your eggs in one basket and WATCH THAT BASKET.”
First, it is very hard to lead an organization out of the valley of death without a clear and simple strategic direction.
you can only outrun them if you commit yourself to a particular direction and go as fast as you can.
Hedging is expensive and dilutes commitment.
If you’re wrong, you will die. But most companies don’t die because they are wrong; most die because
they don’t commit themselves.
They fritter away their momentum and their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greate...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The point is this: how can you hope to mobilize a large team of employees to pull together, accept new and different job assignments, work in an uncertain environment and work hard despite the uncertainty of their future, if the leader of the company can’t or won’t articulate the shape of the other side of the valley?
Clarity of direction, which includes describing what we are going after as well as describing what we will
