- Good strategy
- Should be concise and should answer questions
- Is unexpected and includes policies and resources
- “I’m just going to wait for the next big thing.”
- Competition is always overlooked
- Complementary system design is good strategy
- Sam Walton broke the conventional definition of “store” by focusing on the network
- Bad Strategies:
- Fluff
- Avoidance of the challenge
- Goals
- Bad strategic objectives
- Focus is key
- Avoid template solutions
- Coherent action backed up by a good argument
- Diagnosis of the challenge
- Guiding policy for dealing with the challenge
- Coherent actions that work together to implement the policy
- Strategy should coordinate actions in a coherent way
- Create a “proximate” goal (something clear and near)
- Quality matters when quantity doesn’t scale
- Learn from how young companies succeed, not from they operate when big
- Strategies are sometimes hidden, even to the people enacting them
- Growth for growth’s sake is not wise
- High-profitability is not the same as increasing wealth
- People rarely predict peak and decline (even though most markets do this); more often we predict plateaus
- Consultants undo the entropy!
- Direct the competitive effort outward
- Strategy is a hypothesis
- Vertical integration can help if you need to pivot in a coordinated way
- We like to grab and hold onto the first idea that comes to mind; try to push for another idea
- Privately record your predictions and then compare to real outcomes
- There are no “cost of goods” there are “costs of decisions”