He shrunk Apple to a scale and scope suitable to the reality of its being a niche producer in the highly competitive personal computer business. He cut Apple back to a core that could survive. (Location 338)
Jobs cut all of the desktop models—there were fifteen—back to one. He cut all portable and handheld models back to one laptop. (Location 341)
The power of Jobs’s strategy came from directly tackling the fundamental problem with a focused and coordinated set of actions. He did not announce ambitious revenue or profit goals; he did not indulge in messianic visions of the future. And he did not just cut in a blind ax-wielding frenzy—he redesigned the whole business logic around a simplified product line sold through a limited set of outlets. (Location 350)
The product lineup was too complicated and the company was bleeding cash. A friend of the family asked me which Apple computer she should buy. She couldn’t figure out the differences among them and I couldn’t give her clear guidance, either. I was appalled that there was no Apple consumer computer priced under $2,000. We are replacing all of those desktop computers with one, the Power Mac G3. We are dropping five of six national retailers—meeting their demand has meant too many models at too many price points and too much markup. (Location 355)
Instead, he was actually focused on the sources of and barriers to success in his industry—recognizing the next window of opportunity, the next set of forces he could harness to his advantage, and then having the quickness and cleverness to pounce on it quickly like a perfect predator. (Location 380)
Most complex organizations spread rather than concentrate resources, acting to placate and pay off internal and external interests. (Location 455)
Having conflicting goals, dedicating resources to unconnected targets, and accommodating incompatible interests are the luxuries of the rich and powerful, but they make for bad strategy. Despite this, most organizations will not create focused strategies. Instead, they will generate laundry lists of desirable outcomes and, at the same time, ignore the need for genuine competence in coordinating and focusing their resources. Good strategy requires leaders who are willing and able to say no to a wide variety of actions and interests. Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does. (Location 468)
It is said that strategy brings relative strength to bear against relative weakness. (Location 483)
This whole design—structure, policies, and actions—is coherent. (Location 546)
Many competitors do not have much of a design, shaping each of their elements around some imagined “best practice” form. (Location 547)
Others will have more coherence but will have aimed their designs at different purposes. (Location 548)
And, most important, it argued that having a true competitive strategy meant engaging in actions that imposed exorbitant costs on the other side. (Location 608)
use your relative advantages to impose out-of-proportion costs on the opposition and complicate his problem of competing with you. (Location 625)
Fluff. Fluff is a form of gibberish masquerading as strategic concepts or arguments. It uses “Sunday” words (words that are inflated and unnecessarily abstruse) and apparently esoteric concepts to create the illusion of high-level thinking. • Failure to face the challenge. Bad strategy fails to recognize or define the challenge. When you cannot define the challenge, you cannot evaluate a strategy or improve it. • Mistaking goals for strategy. Many bad strategies are just statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles. • Bad strategic objectives. A strategic objective is set by a leader as a means to an end. Strategic objectives are “bad” when they fail to address critical issues or when they are impracticable. (Location 647)
but describing a destination is no substitute for developing a comprehensive roadmap for how the country will achieve its stated goals.” (Location 672)
The basic problem is confusion between strategy and strategic goals.” (Location 676)
others can hardly be elevated to the status of a “strategy.” A strategy would have to explain why regional conflicts, which have been a constant in human activity for millennia, are suddenly a major security problem. (Location 699)
vague aspirations and new funding for existing institutions, but no policies or programs that could reasonably be expected to make a difference. (Location 718)
Bad strategy is long on goals and short on policy or action. (Location 725)
The “strategies” mentioned were having an electronic trading platform, being an over-the-counter broker, and being an information provider. These were not strategies—they were just names, like butcher, baker, and candlestick maker. If you accept that the phrase “information provider” describes a business strategy, then you are a prime customer for this sort of fluff. (Location 778)
A strategy is a way through a difficulty, an approach to overcoming an obstacle, a response to a challenge. If the challenge is not defined, it is difficult or impossible to assess the quality of the strategy. And if you cannot assess a strategy’s quality, you cannot reject a bad strategy or improve a good one. (Location 788)
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 813)
It follows from a careful definition of the challenge. (Location 846)
It creates policies that concentrate resources and actions on surmounting those difficulties. (Location 847)
“Chad, when a company makes the kind of jump in performance your plan envisions, there is usually a key strength you are building on or a change in the industry that opens up new opportunities. Can you clarify what the point of leverage might be here, in your company?” (Location 884)
address a specific process or accomplishment, such as halving the time it takes to respond to a customer, or getting work from several Fortune 500 corporations. (Location 890)
Motivation is an essential part of life and success, and a leader may justly ask for “one last push,” but the leader’s job is more than that. The job of the leader is also to create the conditions that will make that push effective, to have a strategy worthy of the effort called upon. (Location 917)
What I would advise is that you first work to discover the very most promising opportunities for the business. Those opportunities may be internal, fixing bottlenecks and constraints in the way people work, or external. (Location 923)
It’s normally a good idea to look very closely at what is changing in your business, where you might get a jump on the competition. (Location 926)
The end result will be a strategy that is aimed at channeling energy into what seem to be one or two of the most attractive opportunities, where it looks like you can make major inroads or breakthroughs. (Location 928)
Chad Logan’s “key strategies” had little to do with strategy. They were simply performance goals. This same problem affects many corporate “strategy plans.” (Location 943)
Business leaders know their organizations should have a strategy. Yet many express frustration with the whole process of strategic planning. The reason for this dissatisfaction is that most corporate strategic plans are simply three-year or five-year rolling budgets combined with market share projections. Calling a rolling budget of this type a “strategic plan” gives people false expectations that the exercise will somehow result in a coherent strategy. (Location 944)
Importantly, opportunities, challenges, and changes don’t come along in nice annual packages. The need for true strategy work is episodic, not necessarily annual. (Location 957)
To help clarify this distinction it is helpful to use the word “goal” to express overall values and desires and to use the word “objective” to denote specific operational targets. (Location 966)
Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes. (Location 988)
A good strategy defines a critical challenge. What is more, it builds a bridge between that challenge and action, between desire and immediate objectives that lie within grasp. (Location 1001)
The purpose of good strategy is to offer a potentially achievable way of surmounting a key challenge. (Location 1007)
When a leader characterizes the challenge as underperformance, it sets the stage for bad strategy. Underperformance is a result. The true challenges are the reasons for the underperformance. (Location 1025)
When leaders are unwilling or unable to make choices among competing values and parties, bad strategy is the consequence. A second pathway to bad strategy is the siren song of template-style strategy—filling in the blanks with vision, mission, values, and strategies. (Location 1067)
A third pathway to bad strategy is New Thought—the belief that all you need to succeed is a positive mental attitude. (Location 1070)
Serious strategy work in an already successful organization may not take place until the wolf is at the door—or even until the wolf’s claws actually scratch on the floor—because good strategy is very hard work. At DEC, the wolf was at the door in 1988, but still the hard work of combining the knowledge and judgments of people with different backgrounds and talents was sidestepped. When the wolf finally broke into the house itself, one point of view won and pressed aside the others. By then, it was five years too late to matter. (Location 1122)
Strategy is scarcity’s child and to have a strategy, rather than vague aspirations, is to choose one path and eschew others. There is difficult psychological, political, and organizational work in saying “no” to whole worlds of hopes, dreams, and aspirations. (Location 1128)
Strategies focus resources, energy, and attention on some objectives rather than others. Unless collective ruin is imminent, a change in strategy will make some people worse off. Hence, there will be powerful forces opposed to almost any change in strategy. This is the fate of many strategy initiatives in large organizations. There may be talk about focusing on this or pushing on that, but at the end of the day no one wants to change what they are doing very much. When organizations are unable to make new strategies—when people evade the work of choosing among different paths into the future—then you get vague mom-and-apple-pie goals that everyone can agree on. Such goals are direct evidence of leadership’s insufficient will or political power to make or enforce hard choices. Put differently, universal buy-in usually signals the absence of choice. (Location 1151)
Strategy is the craft of figuring out which purposes are both worth pursuing and capable of being accomplished. (Location 1192)
“If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.” (Location 1274)
John gave me a sidelong look and said, “It looks to me as if there is really only one question you are asking in each case. That question is ‘What’s going on here?’” (Location 1408)
Note: Rofflezibub - sidelong fuckin glance
Slowing growth is a problem for Wall Street but is a natural stage in the development of any noncancerous entity. Although the U.S. market may have been saturated, were there still opportunities for expansion abroad? (Location 1419)
