Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

use your relative advantages to impose out-of-proportion costs on the opposition and complicate his problem of competing with you.

Copying elements of its strategy piecemeal, there will be little benefit. A competitor would have to adopt the whole design, not just a part of it. There is much more to be discussed: first-mover

Strategies focus resources, energy, and attention on some objectives rather than others. Unless collective ruin is imminent, a change in strategy will make some people worse off.

having a true competitive strategy meant engaging in actions that imposed exorbitant costs on the other side.

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

Whatever it is called, the underlying principle is that improvements come from reexamining the details of how work is done, not just from cost controls or incentives.

But the power of that strategy derived from their discovery of a different way of viewing competitive advantage—a shift from thinking about pure military capability to one of looking for ways to impose asymmetric costs on an opponent.

of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.

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