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.

No one has an advantage at everything. Teams, organizations, and even nations have advantages in certain kinds of rivalry under particular conditions. The secret to using advantage is understanding this particularity. You must press where you have advantages and side-step situations in which you do not. You must exploit your rivals’ weaknesses and

To detect a bad strategy, look for one or more of its four major hallmarks: • 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

Strategic actions that are not coherent are either in conflict with one another or taken in pursuit of unrelated challenges.

A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.

Strategic planning was the responsibility of the dean and the faculty executive council. I met with this group and explained the concepts of pivotal issues and the proximate objective. Then I asked the group to imagine that they were allowed to have only one objective. And the objective had to be feasible. What one single feasible objective, when

By committing to a judgment—especially a diagnosis—you increase the probability that you will disagree with some of the assessments of others, and thereby increase the chance of

“Let’s start with technical assistance,” I say. “Melissa pointed out that putting soda in a can is not atomic science. What kind of customer needs technical help to get their product into a can?” My question only evokes blank looks. I have lectured on how to tackle seemingly formless questions like this. The first trick is to replace general nouns

People normally think of strategy in terms of action—a strategy is what an organization does. But strategy also embodies an approach to overcoming some difficulty. Identifying the difficulties and obstacles will give you a much clearer picture of the pattern of existing and possible strategies. Even more important, you will gain access to how