Quotes About Strategy

I drove my right fist into its stupid, creepy face. Man, the yahoos I scrap with never seem to anticipate that tactic. They all assume that what with me being a wizard and all, I'm going to stand back and chuck Magic Missiles at them or something, then scream and run away the second they get close enough to let me see the whites of their eyes.

Bob somehow waggled his eyebrow ridges. "Hey, you never went out with Charybdis. What's the plan?

I had this teacher who kept telling me that if I was ever in a fair fight, someone had made a mistake," she said

but one of them had rolled a higher initiative this round

You've played me at my own game, and ably. I thought you capable of nothing but overt action. Clearly I underestimated you." "Don't feel bad," I said. "I mean, I look so stupid.

Our idea of diplomacy is showing up with a gun in one hand and a sandwich in the other and asking which you'd prefer.

Visionary companies pursue a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one—and not necessarily the primary one.

by breakthrough, broken into three broad stages: disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined

In no case do we have a company that just happened to be sitting on the nose cone of a rocket when it took off.

My God, these guys don't even know what the return-on-investment will be on this thing.

Stop doing lists are more important thanto do lists.

Consensus decisions are often at odds with intelligent decisions.

There is never a need to outrun anything you can outwit.

Hindenburg than to win a majority. As

I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

I mean maybe I was holding all of the aces, but what was the game?

Competing to be the best feeds on imitation. Competing to be unique thrives on innovation.

A common mistake in strategy is to choose the same core competences as everyone else in your industry.

The first test of a strategy is whether your value proposition is different from your rivals. If you are trying to serve the same customers and meet the same needs and sell at the same relative price, then by Porter's definition, you don't have a strategy.

Insight into customers' needs is important, but it's not enough. The essence of strategy and competitive advantage lies in the activities, in choosing to perform activities differently or to perform different activities from those of rivals. Each of the companies we've just described has done just that, tailoring their value chains to their value propositions.

Porter defines the value proposition as the answer to three fundamental questions (see figure 4-1): Which customers are you going to serve? Which needs are you going to meet? What relative price will provide acceptable value for customers and acceptable profitability for the company?

Instead of competing to be the best, companies can—and should—compete to be unique. This concept is all about value.

As manufactured products have become increasingly commoditylike, and therefore less valuable to customers, GE has not been alone in discovering that often more money can be made from the services related to a product

Price competition, Porter warns, is the most damaging form of rivalry. The more rivalry is based on price, the more you are engaged in competing to be the best.