Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters

Rather, the term “strategy” should mean a cohesive response to an important challenge.

I am describing a strategy as a design rather than as a plan or as a choice because I want to emphasize the issue of mutual adjustment. In design problems, where various elements must be arranged, adjusted, and coordinated, there can be sharply peaked gains to getting combinations right and sharp costs to getting them wrong. A good strategy coordin

The first logical problem in chain-link situations is to identify the bottlenecks, and Marco did that—quality, sales’ technical competence, and cost. The second, and greatest, problem is that incremental change may not pay off and may even make things worse.

It is strategy which transforms these vague overall goals into a coherent set of actionable objectives—

If new insights or ideas are not needed, deduction is sufficient. There can be times when results are fine, when no new opportunities seem to have developed and no new risks have appeared. Then, the logical answer to the strategy question is simply “Keep it up, do more of the same.” But in a world of change and flux, “more of the same” is rarely th

News media can be differentiated in three basic dimensions: territory (world, national, regional, local), frequency (hourly, daily, and so on), and depth (headline, feature story, in-depth expert analysis). I believe that the attractor state for news contains specialists along each of these dimensions rather than generalists trying to be all things

The idea that people have goals and automatically chase after them like some kind of homing missile is plain wrong.

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

Despite all the high-level concepts consultants advertise, the bread and butter of every consultant’s business is undoing entropy—cleaning up the debris and weeds that grow in every organizational garden.

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