Quotes from Rita Gunther McGrath

hypercompetition" to characterize markets in which a firm's competitive advantage would be quickly competed away.8

Infosys, for instance, is very focused on which types of clients it will serve and which it will not. The company focuses on high-growth industry segments and on the "reference" clients within them.

It refuses to pursue business (even though there are big volumes to be had) that doesn't involve value-added for its clients in some meaningful way, rather than simply benefit from labor cost arbitrage.

I]t would have been impossible to predict or plan how to develop TerraCycle so that it would make it to the place it stands today. The trick was to be ever vigilant in seeking opportunities and to be ready to jump on them if they felt right inside and consistent with our core mission, even before they could be well thought out.

Without the assumption that an advantage will be long-lived, the urgency of an organization to move quickly increases.

Consistent, ongoing innovation and extraordinary closeness to customers is the only possible response.

Though part of the puzzle is obviously capital budget allocations, most companies seem to have a much higher awareness of the rules by which capital and assets are allocated than they do about how skilled people should be spending their time.

constructively paranoid

This much being said, don't get trapped into microallocating people's time. Allocating personnel-months is sufficient for most projects of any strategic significance.

increasing the value it offers to patients beyond the raw molecule rather than being a commodity producer of off-patent pharmaceuticals.

Business model innovation was every bit as important as R&D or product innovation.17

custom engineering" unit, which basically keeps capabilities on the shelf but which can reinvigorate them when they seem relevant once more to a customer's problem or retire them when the customer no longer needs support.

The goal is to convert assumptions to knowledge as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Just because the resources are there doesn't mean that they should be spent.

career risk that often leads managers to cling to eroding businesses long after they should have moved on.

and massive numbers of assumptions are tested.

We must not try to become large in order to become powerful. We must become powerful in order to become large.

It is all too common for companies to rush through this phase, curtailing the valuable learning of what the ultimate product or service might look like.

extracted resources from cash-generating but low-growth arenas such

small initial investments to explore opportunities, following up later with more substantial investments as the opportunity warrants. They are also willing to abandon a particular initiative if it doesn't appear to be developing effectively. Overall, the firms tended to move earlier than competitors into spaces that appeared attractive

Despite its efforts to modernize its plants and make them competitive, one sees a gradual withdrawal from those arenas

don't always get it right—in fact, if my ideas about temporary advantage and learning from failure apply, it's almost impossible for a company to call it correctly every time.

Two contradictory activities. From a company point of view, it makes perfect sense.

We Have Not Yet Built Our Defining Product