Quotes About Strategy

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

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.

resources are directed by a governance mechanism that is separate from any given business unit.

When competitive advantages don't last, or last for a much shorter time than they used to, the strategy playbook needs to change. Leaders

Deconstructing reward systems, processes, legacy programs, structures, networks, and other elements used to deliver to an old advantage is not going to happen by accident and calls for real leadership.

outlier firms also appeared to have fewer big, high-risk all-or-nothing bets, which is also consistent with an options orientation.

change how you run the assets that deliver expensive nonnegotiable attributes.

limit the downside cultural and business risks.

stable competitive forces—take the time and effort to deeply understand these forces, and voilà, you can create a road map for your other decisions that is likely to last for some time. The emphasis in strategy was therefore analytical: because industries were assumed to be relatively

Stretch and contradictory goals are important

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The only sensible thing to do when you are attacked is, as Napoleon once said, to counter-attack.

let's learn and note The art of politics. Let's teach you how to miss the boat And how to drop some bricks, And how to win the people's vote And lots of other tricks. Let's learn to make a speech a day Upon the T.V. screen, In which you never never say Exactly what you mean.

The only sensible thing to do when you are attacked is, as Napoleon once said, to counter

as the king rose from his seat, Ehud reached with his left hand, drew the sword from his right thigh and plunged it into the king's belly. Even the handle sank in after the blade, and his bowels discharged. Ehud did not pull the sword out, and the fat closed in over it. (That's in the Bible. Word for word.)