Good Strategy Bad Strategy

The most basic idea of strategy is the application of strength against weakness. Or, if you prefer, strength applied to most promising opportunity.

Strategy involves focus and, therefore, choice. And choice means setting aside some goals in favor of others. When this hard work is not done, weak amorphous strategy is the result.

Condorcet Paradox There is difficult psychological, political and organizational work in saying “no” to whole worlds of hopes,dreams and aspirations.

Good strategy is not just “what” you are trying to do. It is also “why” and “how” you are doing it.

The most critical anticipations are about the behaviour of others, especially rivals.

Certain aspects of future events are predetermined. If there is a storm in the Himalayas, you can confidently predict that tomorrow, or the next day, there will be flooding in the Ganges plain.

To achieve leverage, the strategist must have insight into a pivot point that will magnify the effects of focused energy and resources.

A “threshold effect” exists when there is a critical level or effect necessary to affect the system.

To take responsibility is more than a willingness to accept the blame. It is setting proximate objectives and handing the organization a problem it can actually solve. Instance: Surface of the moon, rover moon landing.

If and when sufficient positional advantages have been accumulated they generally can be cashed in with greater or less ease by tactical maneuvers against specific targets that are no longer defensible or only at terrible cost. Today, as then, many effective strategies are more design than decisions-are more constructed than chosen.

Resources and tight coordination are partial substitutes for each other. If the organization has few resources the challenge can be met only by clever, tight integration. On the other hand, if more resources are available, then less tight integration may be needed.

It is usually quite difficult to convince buyers to pay an upfront premium for future savings, even if the numbers are clear. People tend to be more myopic than economic theory would suggest. This particular pattern-attacking a segment of the market with a business system supplying more value to that segment that the other players can - is called focus.

For an advantage to be sustained, your competitors must not be able to duplicate it. Or, more precisely, they must not be able to duplicate resources underlying it.

Advantage is rooted in differences-in the asymmetries among rivals. In real rivalry, there are an uncountable number of asymmetries. It is the leader’s job to identify which asymmetries are critical which can be turned into important advantages.

To date, there are no successful online sources of revenue other than advertising. The more that advertising can be targeted based on user demographics and revealed interests, the more a media site can change its placement.

Planning and planting a garden is always more interesting and stimulating than weeding it, but without constant weeding and maintenance the pattern that defines a garden-the imposition of a special order on nature-fades away and disappears.

If the design becomes absolute, management’s job is to create a new way of coordinating efforts so that the competitive energy is directed outward instead of inward.

Many of the fundamental components of modern 3-D graphics technology were developed at the University of Utah as part of a stream of research initiated by Professors Ive, Sutherland and David Evaans in the late 1960s. The program produced an astounding number of computer graphics superstars, including John Warnach, founder of Adobe Systems, Molar Busnell, founder of Atari,Edwan Cotmull, cofounder of Pixar; and Jim Clark, founder of both Silicon Graphics and Netscape.

The human mind is finite, its cognitive resources limited. Attention, like a flashligh beam, illuminates one subject only to darken another. When we attend to one set of issues, we lose sight of another.

Social herding presses us to thing that everything is OK (or not OK) because everyone else is saying so. The inside view presses us to ignore the lessons of other times and other places, believing that our compacny, our nation,our new venture, or our era is different. It is important to push back against these biases. You can do this by paying attention to real-world data that refutes the echo-chamber chanting of the crowd-and by learning the lessons taught by history and by other people in other places.