The trick, I said, is that “you need to know something special about this business, to have an approach based on a special appreciation of the situation or on special information. To develop this appreciation, you need to decide which is the more important focus, aerobics or Mammoth. Then, immerse yourself in that subject. Learn about the people,

Strategy began when people realized that telling warriors to ‘go out and fight the invaders’ didn’t work. Leaders had to impose a structure, a design, on how the group would fight. In a modern business, a strategy is the exercise of power to make parts of the system do things they would not do, if left to themselves.”

The first climber said that he chooses the climb having the greatest expected reward and whose crux he believes he can solve. In a flash of insight, I realize this describes the approaches of many of the more effective people I have known and observed. Whether facing problems or opportunities, they focused on the way forward promising the greatest

A second approach is to “take things off the table.” At one government agency, the group had developed a list of twenty-six “key” challenges. Each was noted on a five-by-eight-inch index card on the conference table. I told the group that we had to simplify down to five by physically taking twenty-one “off the table.” No one volunteered to remove

The “art of strategy” is not decision making—that discipline assumes that you have been handed a list of possible actions from among which to choose. The art of strategy is not finding your one true goal and passionately pursuing it with all your heart and soul in everything you do—that is a type of mental illness called monomania. The art of

The crux of the difficulty was the software. Installation had to be tailored to the client’s internal systems, and there were constant updates and bug fixes to manage.

For the strategist, focus is not just attention. It means bringing a source of power to bear on a selected target. If the power is weak, nothing happens. If it is strong but scattered and diffused across targets, nothing happens. If power is focused on the wrong target, nothing happens. But when power is focused on the right target, breakthroughs

I told the seven executives that I had the good fortune to know a scientist working on a time viewer.

Real-life business strategy is a bit like that route up a mountain. You may have an ambition to get to the top of a particular peak, but the route requires overcoming a series of difficulties. Climbers call them “problems.” And, as each difficulty is overcome, there are new views of the problems and opportunities that lie ahead. And, if you make