Great by Choice

More important than being first or the most creative is figuring out what works in practice, doing it better than anyone else, and then making the very most of it with a 20 Mile March.

10X companies used a combination of creative bullets (such as new products, technologies, services, and processes) and acquisitions. For an acquisition to qualify as a bullet, it needs to meet the three tests: low cost, low risk, and low distraction.

3. A bullet is low distraction. Note: this means low distraction for the overall enterprise; it might be very high distraction for one or a few individuals.

work, and just might get you killed. Analytic skills still matter, but empirical validation matters much more.

You can get away with failing to 20 Mile March in stable times for a while, but doing so leaves you weak and undisciplined, and therefore exposed when unstable times come. And they will always come.

It was a huge change for Microsoft to embrace the Internet, and yet most of Microsoft’s recipe remained intact.

Sometimes acting too fast increases risk. Sometimes acting too slow increases risk. The critical question is, “How much time before your risk profile changes?” Do you have seconds? Minutes? Hours? Days? Weeks? Months? Years? Decades? The primary difficulty lies not in answering the question but in having the presence of mind to ask the question.

if you fire only bullets but never commit to a big bet or an audacious objective, you’ll never do anything great.

Social psychology research indicates that at times of uncertainty, most people look to other people—authority figures, peers, group norms—for their primary cues about how to proceed.16 10Xers, in contrast, do not look to conventional wisdom to set their course during times of uncertainty, nor do they primarily look to what other people do, or to wh