A New Way to Think

A possibility is essentially a happy story that describes how a firm might succeed. Each story lays out where the company plays in its market and how it wins there. It should have internally consistent logic, but it need not be proved at this point. As long as we can imagine that it could be valid, it makes the cut. Characterizing possibilities as

In this chapter I’ll lay out a seven-step approach to strategy-making anchored in the structured formulation of a set of well-articulated hypotheses—or strategic possibilities—for strategists to choose between.

To actually create shareholder value, put your customers before your shareholders. In other words—and nobody should be surprised by this—Peter Drucker had it right when he said that the primary purpose of a business is to acquire and keep customers.

the possibilities-based approach forces managers to move away from asking “What is the right answer?” and concentrate instead on “What are the right questions? What specifically must we know in order to make a good decision?”

The dominant model holds that first you formulate or choose your strategy and then you execute or implement it. A more effective model sees no dividing line between “strategy” and “execution.” Rather, both are identically making choices under uncertainty, constraints, and competition.

Any condition that is put forward should be added to the list. The person putting it forward should simply be asked to explain why that condition would be necessary for him to be confident; he should not be challenged about the truth of the condition.

Charles Sanders Peirce’s observation that no new idea in the history of the world has been proven in advance analytically, which means that if you insist on rigorous proof of the merits of an idea during its development, you will kill it if it is truly a breakthrough idea, because there will be no proof of its breakthrough characteristics in advanc

But when I looked closely at the process, I realized that the screening methodology the client used involved projecting future sales based on currently existing data. This meant that for innovations that were minor variations on the status quo, relatively compelling data tended to be available, and these projects consistently made it through the va

The traditional model in strategy is to focus on asking the question: What is true? A more effective model for framing and making strategy choices is to focus on the logic behind the choice by asking: What would have to be true?