The Strategist Quotes

“Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“As a leader, if you ignore or underestimate your crucial, ongoing role as a strategist, something essential in your business will be missing. Answered well over a lifetime, the questions at the heart of strategy will help a company prevail. Answered poorly, or not at all, they leave it adrift and vulnerable. Articulating”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“When that happens, I remind them that executives don’t get paid to be right. They get paid to be effective.”14”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Your system of value creation has to be flexible and adaptable. Like your strategy, it too has to evolve over time, and respond to—or better yet, anticipate—changes in the business environment or within the firm itself that can make its elements obsolete.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“notes that the conservative nature of people pushes back against innovation, and many leaders themselves resist change: “While doing what is familiar is always easy . . . doing what is new is not.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“having accepted that the only sustainable strategy is one that anticipates change, you’re ready to embrace becoming the strategist who takes your company where it needs to go.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Leading strategy is a nonstop responsibility; it can’t be outsourced or solved in one great brainstorming session.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“To be sure, competitive advantage is essential to strategy, and the longer it lasts, the better. But any one advantage, even a company’s underlying system of value creation, is only part of a bigger story, one frame in a motion picture. It is the need to manage across frames, day by day, year over year, that makes a leader’s role in strategy so vital.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“it combines Apple’s incredible technology base with Apple’s legendary ease of use with Apple’s awesome design. Those three things come together in this, and it’s like, that’s what we do. So if anybody was ever wondering why is Apple on earth, I would hold up this as a good example.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“You can’t be everything to everybody, although a lot of weak strategies and strategy statements implicitly claim to be. It doesn’t work.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“And it has these qualities: • It is reasonably short and parsimonious. • It is specific. • It states what the company does and why it matters in a way that anyone can summarize without having to quote it literally. • It avoids jargon, such as “best of breed,” “best in class,” or vague words such as superior, expert, and empowered. • It is affirming, but not grandiose or self-important. • People easily recognize that it’s you.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“about what a company does and how it does it: • Who we serve • With what sort of products or services • What we do that’s different or better • What enables us to do that”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“The purpose in the center says why you exist—what you do differently or better than others—and the unique configuration of activities and resources around the rim shows what will enable you to deliver on that promise.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“As we discussed in chapter 4, your company’s purpose describes the unique value your firm brings to the world. It’s the throbbing heartbeat of your strategy—the grand pronouncement of who you are and why you matter. It should be specific and easy to grasp because the rest of your strategy flows from and supports this beginning.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Many people believe a strategist’s primary job is thinking. It isn’t. The number-one job is setting an agenda and putting in place the organization to carry it out.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“great strategy is more than an aspiration, more than a dream: It’s a system of value creation, a set of mutually reinforcing parts. Anchored by a compelling purpose, it tells you where a company will play, how it will play, and what it will accomplish.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Purpose is where performance differences start. Nothing else is more important to the survival and success of a firm than why it exists, and what otherwise unmet needs it intends to fill. It is the first and most important question a strategist must answer. Every concept of strategy that has entered the conversation of business managers—sustainable competitive advantage, positioning, differentiation, added value, even the firm effect—flows from purpose. EFFECTIVE”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Purpose is the way IKEA or any other company describes itself in the most fundamental terms possible—why it exists, the unique value it brings to the world, what sets it apart, and why and to whom it matters. Notice how IKEA’s purpose as expressed above answers all these questions.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Perhaps more than any other company in the world, IKEA has become a curator of people’s lifestyles, if not their lives. IKEA World [is] a state of mind that revolves around contemporary design, low prices, wacky promotions, and an enthusiasm that few institutions in or out of business can muster.”1”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Third, whatever you do, don’t underestimate the power of these forces. Their impact on the destiny of your business may well be as great as your own.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Second, even if you understand your industry’s competitive forces, you must find a way to deal with them that is up to the challenge. That may mean skillful positioning, deliberate efforts to counter negative forces or exploit favorable ones, or even a timely exit. But don’t be trapped by the myth into believing that your superior management skills will carry you to success.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“They, like Welch, Buffett, and other astute business leaders, grasp the lesson of the industry effect and its profound implications for firm performance. They recognize that, as in the famous serenity prayer, you must accept the things you cannot change, have the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference. It’s a lesson great strategists understand well, but it’s not an easy lesson to accept and master. The myth of the super-manager is hard to let go.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“What’s been forgotten is that strategy is not a destination or a solution. It’s not a problem to be solved and settled. It’s a journey. It needs continuous, not intermittent, leadership.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Does your company matter? That’s the most important question every business leader must answer. If you closed its doors today, would your customers suffer any real loss?1 How long would it take, and how difficult would it be, for them to find another firm that could meet those needs as well as you did? Most”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“A great strategy is more than an aspiration, more than a dream: It’s a system of value creation, a set of mutually reinforcing parts. Anchored by a compelling purpose,”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“the reason you exist, the specific customers you’ve chosen to serve, the market needs you fill, must set you apart from others who generically do what you do.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Success comes from a compelling purpose, tightly embedded in an interlocking system of value creation, and does so in a way that is difficult for others to imitate.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“The intrinsic value of a well-developed system is perhaps easiest to see when a competitor tries to duplicate a successful firm. If you had the recipe, you could make Coca-Cola, for instance, but you wouldn’t be able to duplicate its brand recognition, its supply and distribution lines, or its pricing. These are resources and activities the firm has honed over decades; the fact that they work together in a tightly linked system makes them all that much more difficult to imitate.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“On the way home, if the person sitting next to you on the plane asks what you do, simply say: ‘I’m a guardian of organizational purpose”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Good communication is not simply sending and receiving. Nor is good communication simply an exchange of data,” he wrote. “The best communication forces you to listen.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs