Good Strategy Bad Strategy

In the process, I have condensed my list of its key hallmarks to the four listed in the beginning of this chapter: fluff, the failure to face the challenge, mistaking goals for strategy, and bad strategic objectives. (Location 701)

If you fail to identify and analyze the obstacles, you don’t have a strategy. Instead, you have either a stretch goal, a budget, or a list of things you wish would happen. (Location 787)

bad strategy is vacuous and superficial, has internal contradictions, and doesn’t define or address the problem. Bad strategy generates a feeling of dull annoyance when you have to listen to it or read it. The next chapter examines why so much bad strategy exists. (Location 1031)

Put differently, universal buy-in usually signals the absence of choice. (Location 1133)

Strategy is the craft of figuring out which purposes are both worth pursuing and capable of being accomplished. (Location 1168)

I do not know whether meditation and other inward journeys perfect the human soul. But I do know that believing that rays come out of your head and change the physical world, and that by thinking only of success you can become a success, are forms of psychosis and cannot be recommended as approaches to management or strategy. (Location 1340)

Note: Agree Another example of difference between self efficacy and self esteem Believing it alone isn't enough but the power to believe you can achieve it is helpful

The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical. A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis. A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy. (Location 1353)

A guiding policy creates advantage by anticipating the actions and reactions of others, by reducing the complexity and ambiguity in the situation, by exploiting the leverage inherent in concentrating effort on a pivotal or decisive aspect of the situation, and by creating policies and actions that are coherent, each building on the other rather than canceling one another out. (Location 1489)

For example, there seems to be a threshold effect in advertising. That is, a very small amount of advertising will produce no result at all. One has to get over this hump, or threshold, to start getting a response to advertising efforts.5 This means it may pay companies to pulse their advertising, concentrating it into relatively short periods of time, rather than spreading it evenly. It may also make sense for a company to roll out a new product region by region, concentrating its advertising where the product is new so as to spur adoption. (Location 1751)

Folly is the direct pursuit of happiness and beauty. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (Location 1793)

To concentrate on an objective—to make it a priority—necessarily assumes that many other important things will be taken care of. (Location 1938)

A system has a chain-link logic when its performance is limited by its weakest subunit, or “link.” When there is a weak link, a chain is not made stronger by strengthening the other links. (Location 1951)

For instance, the various problems at General Motors from 1980 to 2008 had strong chain-link features. Increasing the quality of an automobile transmission does little good if the knobs fall off the dashboard and door panels continue to rattle. Improving fit and finish, along with the drivetrain, may offer little overall improvement as long as the designers continue to produce pedestrian designs. Improving the look of the automobiles may only increase costs unless the complex technology of design for manufacturability is mastered. And so on. (Location 1976)

By definition, winging it is not a strategy. (Location 2136)

When someone says “Managers are decision makers,” they are not talking about master strategists, for a master strategist is a designer. (Location 2166)

There, I had learned how to mathematically model systems and then minimize something, such as cost or least-squared error. But this work at JPL was different. I had to learn enough about all the subsystems and their possible interactions, and hold it all in my mind, in order to imagine a configuration that might be effective. This was difficult, to say the least. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was beginning to learn strategy. (Location 2218)

The proposition that growth itself creates value is so deeply entrenched in the rhetoric of business that it has become an article of almost unquestioned faith that growth is a good thing. (Location 2570)

But unless you can buy companies for less than they are worth, or unless you are specially positioned to add more value to the target than anyone else can, no value is created by such expansion. (Location 2577)

That is, wealth increases when competitive advantage increases or when the demand for the resources underlying it increases (Location 2791)

Speaking about the 4004, and microprocessors in general, then chairman Andy Grove said, “I think it gave Intel its future, and for the first fifteen years we didn’t realize it. It has become Intel’s defining business area. But for … maybe the first ten years, we looked at it as a sideshow.”1 (Location 3064)

Similarly, weakly managed organizations tend to become less organized and focused. Entropy makes it necessary for leaders to constantly work on maintaining an organization’s purpose, form, and methods even if there are no changes in strategy or competition. (Location 3325)

Organizational inertia generally falls into one of three categories: the inertia of routine, cultural inertia, and inertia by proxy. (Location 3336)

good strategy has, at a minimum, three essential components: a (Location 4364)

diagnosis of the situation, the choice of an overall guiding policy, and the design of coherent action (Location 4365)

The same principle applies to any meeting you attend. What issues do you expect to arise in the meeting? Who will take which position? Privately commit yourself in advance to some judgments about these issues, and you will have daily opportunities to learn, improve, and recalibrate your judgment. (Location 4473)