Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

Failure to face the challenge. Bad strategy fails to recognize or define the challenge.

Bad strategy flourishes because it floats above analysis, logic, and choice, held aloft by the hot hope that one can avoid dealing with these tricky fundamentals and the difficulties of mastering them.

It is hard to show your skill as a sailor when there is no wind. Similarly, it is in moments of industry transition that skills at strategy are most valuable. During the relatively stable periods between episodic transitions, it is difficult for followers to catch the leader, just as it is difficult for one of the two or three leaders to pull far a

combinations of resources for dealing with new risks and opportunities.

Starbucks did not vertically integrate to purposefully confuse the competition. It did so in order to be able to mutually adjust multiple elements of its business and to capture the information generated by each element of its business operations.

good strategies are usually “corner solutions.” That is, they emphasize focus over compromise. They focus on one aspect of the situation, not trying to be all things to all people.

To concentrate on an objective—to make it a priority—necessarily assumes that many other important things will be taken care of.

Thus, once Schultz initiated business operations, he began to accumulate privileged information.

To search for a new insight, one would have to put aside the comfort of being oriented and once again cast around in choppy waters for a new source of stability.