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

since these movers and shakers are not just passive actors, the incentives work to actually increase the amount of riskiness in the economy.

In thinking about change I have found it very helpful to use the concept of an attractor state. An industry attractor state describes how the industry “should” work in the light of technological forces and the structure of demand. By saying “should,” I mean to emphasize an evolution in the direction of efficiency—meeting the needs and demands of bu

Choices, not products, have costs.

the potential gains to coordination do not mean that more centrally directed coordination is always a good thing. Coordination is costly, because it fights against the gains to specialization, the most basic economies in organized activity. To specialize in something is, roughly speaking, to be left alone to do just that thing and not be bothered w

When the “strategy” process is basically a game of setting performance goals—so much market share and

Engineering higher demand for the services of scarce resources is actually the most basic of business stratagems.

diagnosis is a judgment about the meanings of facts.

Being strategic is being less myopic—less shortsighted—than others. You must perceive and take into account what others do not, be they colleagues or rivals. Being less myopic is not the same as pretending you can see the future. You must work with the facts on the ground, not the vague outlines of the distant future. Whether it is insight into ind

What he did was both obvious and, at the same time, unexpected. 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.