Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

Not miscalculation, bad strategy is the active avoidance of the hard work of crafting a good strategy. One common reason for choosing avoidance is the pain or difficulty of choice.

The creation of new strengths through subtle shifts in viewpoint. An insightful reframing of a competitive situation can create whole new patterns of advantage and weakness. The most powerful strategies arise from such game-changing insights.

Plus, by couching strategy in terms of positives—vision, mission, and values—no feelings are hurt.

A new alternative should flow from a reconsideration of the facts of the situation, and it should also address the weaknesses of any already developed alternatives.

Follow the story of Nvidia and you will clearly see the kernel of a good strategy at work: diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent action. You will also glimpse almost every building block of good strategy: intelligent anticipation, a guiding policy that reduced complexity, the power of design, focus, using advantage, riding a dynamic wave of chang

Half of what alert participants learn in a strategy exercise is to consider the competition even when no one tells you to do it in advance.

The creation of new strengths through subtle shifts in viewpoint. An insightful reframing of a competitive situation can create whole new patterns of advantage and weakness. The most powerful strategies arise from such game-changing insights.

the cutting edge of any strategy is the set of strategic objectives (subgoals) it lays out.

Two equally skillful chess players sit waiting for the game to begin—which one has the advantage? Two identical armies meet on a featureless plain—which one has the advantage? The answers to these questions is “neither,” because advantage is rooted in differences—in the asymmetries among rivals. In real rivalry, there are an uncountable number of a