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

The problem was that he left the company’s traditional competitive advantage behind without replacing

Still, I am convinced that judgment can be improved with practice. For that practice to be effective, you should first commit your judgments to writing.

The most critical anticipations are about the behavior of others, especially rivals.

How someone can see what others have not, or what they have ignored, and thereby discover a pivotal objective and create an advantage, lies at the very edge of our understanding, something glimpsed only out of the corner of our minds. Not every good strategy draws on this kind of insight, but those that do generate the extra kick

When the senior person sits in the back, and to the side, I have learned that it generally signals an early exit rather than engagement.

“Both Wal-Mart and Kmart began to install bar-code scanners at cash registers in the early 1980s. Why did Wal-Mart seem to benefit from this more than Kmart?”

siren song of template-style strategy—filling in the blanks with vision, mission, values, and strategies. This path offers a one-size-fits-all substitute for the hard work of analysis and coordinated action.

In general, strategic leverage arises from a mixture of anticipation, insight into what is most pivotal or critical in a situation, and making a concentrated application of effort.

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