Strategy

A good strategy is a journey from seeing a blurry blob to seeing crisp blocks.

This is why successful companies still pursuing breakthroughs are always led by live players, often the founders.

Only Mark Zuckerberg could have changed Facebook's name and decided it was now a virtual reality hardware company.

And if you want to predict the future, go to a history lecture or set your WARC case study date filter to twenty years ago.

A strategy is a high-level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty, designed through recognizing the challenge (diagnosis), setting a direction to overcome it (guiding policy), and detailing steps to implement the policy (coherent actions).

At the core, strategy is about focus, and most complex organizations don’t focus their resources. Instead, they pursue multiple goals at once, not concentrating enough resources to achieve a breakthrough in any of them.

If you fail to identify and analyze the obstacles, you don’t have a strategy. Instead, you have either a stretch goal, a budget, or a list of things you wish would happen.

A hallmark of true expertise and insight is making a complex subject understandable. A hallmark of mediocrity and bad strategy is unnecessary complexity—a flurry of fluff masking an absence of substance

It is hard to show your skill as a sailor when there is no wind.

So, in short, the master plan is:

1. Build sports car


2. Use that money to build an affordable car


3. Use that money to build an even more affordable car


4. While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options