Quotes from Rita Gunther McGrath

people seek out information that suggests they are correct, in a world of transient advantage the most valuable information is often disconfirming—it helps highlight where the greatest risks in being wrong are.

And, on a bad day, the methods and motives of the source will be challenged

For people with valuable, rare, or in-demand skills, however, the rewards are likely to be rich indeed. This last chapter of the book discusses how you should be thinking about your personal career strategy in light of transient advantages.

glamorous Italian supermodels being wooed by American farm boys

A farmer in Jhalsu village loses a whole day's earnings if he goes to a bank branch, a couple of km away, for a simple transaction like depositing or withdrawing cash.

What I think it should have done was realize that preparing customers for transitions is just like getting them through the new product adoption process, except in reverse.

transition to mechanisms for getting to scale, fast. The business that has been protected from conventional disciplines (such as producing return on investment)

managers with a different mind-set start to become more important, and the business needs to become part of the parent corporation.

references to a few clear and simple strategic priorities, to the importance of building culture and developing talent, and to leveraging a few core capabilities.

The fundamental problem is that in a world dominated by those pursuing exploitation, the innovation process is light amusement at best, a dangerous threat at worst.

knights and no outside-the-industry saviors. Interestingly, and also consistent with the findings of other researchers over the years, the most senior leaders generally kept a low profile.

decline, downsizing, near death, desperation, bet the company, and revival that characterizes so many corporate histories (such as Nokia, IBM, Procter & Gamble, and many others).

So before you let people blunder around reinventing the process every time someone gets the urge to innovate, it makes sense to understand it first.

Pursuing a strategy in which it has explicitly told investors that it will sacrifice some margin to sustain strong growth, it doubles down on investments made to create a compelling result

wrenching change seldom characterizes strategic shifts at the outlier companies

So even in firms that embrace change and appear to manage it well, there are elements of tremendous stability in their businesses.

allowing an existing structure to remain in place for too long creates inertia and results in an organization that is maladapted to the opportunities it finds.

Organizations have habits. And they will cling to their habits at the expense sometimes of their own survival.

They reallocate resources flexibly and on an ongoing basis, rather than going through sudden divestitures or restructurings.

spend more time with a specific set of must-have customers, disproportionate to the revenue they might account for at that specific point of time; taking on projects which might not give high margins initially, but might eventually become big;

on a single dominant idea: that the purpose of strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Historically, strategy and innovation have been thought of as two separate disciplines

co-location of its teams with its clients.

the ratio of assumptions you have to make relative to knowledge that you possess is high—a different set of disciplines needs to be employed.