Quotes from Rita Gunther McGrath

stretch, instability, and multidimensionality are crucial to keep a company from getting stuck.

What happened? A long track record of relatively stable success caused the ambition to hungrily search for new opportunities to atrophy.

Stretch and contradictory goals are important

I do think that creating the right foundation for your culture allows you to make changes as you need to make changes.

We hire for learnability—we deliberately select people for their capacity to learn new things.

The important point is that the competitive life of an asset may be different (and usually shorter) than its accounting life.

The goal is to understand how this period can be extended for as long as possible while simultaneously being mindful that it will eventually erode.

training people to be able to move from advantage to advantage becomes a cost of doing business. It's just as important a bill to pay as the one you pay to keep the lights on and the computers running. Investing in people's capacity to move around removes a tremendous barrier to change and suggests a redirection of emphasis from pure deployment to creating transition capability.

In a transient-advantage context, unlike a conventional one, disengaging is not confused with business failure.

innovators and experimenters who are comfortable with ambiguity and prepared to learn.

The exploitation phase needs people who thrive on designing effective processes and making things systematic. The disengagement phase requires those who are good at seeing early evidence of decline and unafraid to make the sometimes-difficult decisions to stop doing something. In an organization of any complexity, part of the challenge from the strategists' point of view is that you will have many such waves playing out, in different phases, all at the same time.

maintaining an organizational system that can maintain the complementarity between the forces for innovation and those for stability.

aggressively and frequently change the management team, a pattern found by consultancy Accenture.2

All happy families are alike, while all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.

The data were hidden in various systems, spreadsheets, and even people's heads. At Accenture, Modruson told me, this task would be a trivial exercise taking just minutes.

To be proficient, an organization needs a governance mechanism suitable for innovation (and usually separate from the planning and budgeting processes of the core business)

With discovery-driven growth (DDG), you invest small amounts of money—money you can afford to lose—to get the information that you need so that you can invest more confidently.

TABLE 5-4 Comparison of fax and alternatives The point of understanding the NCO is that it can clarify what attributes you assume will attract customers and what kinds of trade-offs these same customers will make.

The major conclusion was that this group of firms was pursuing strategies with a long-term perspective on where they wanted to go, but also with the recognition that whatever they were doing today wasn't going to drive their future growth. Interestingly, they had identified and implemented ways of combining tremendous internal stability while motivating tremendous external agility, particularly in terms of business models.

benefited from the declining category by developing an innovative business model—insurance, rather than simply relying on manufacturing.

Moving from advantage to advantage is seen as quite normal, not exceptional. Clinging to older advantages is seen as potentially dangerous.

Infosys is quite disciplined about its selection of customers, refusing to serve those who do not help the company to develop new sources of value.

Preventing resources from being held hostage by the leaders of a particular advantage will become more standard as firms become aware of the dangers of a leader hanging on to an old advantage for too long.

Prediction and being "right" will be less important than reacting quickly and taking corrective action.