Sublime

Not miscalculation, bad strategy is the active avoidance of the hard work of crafting a good strategy.

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.

A guiding policy creates advantage by anticipating the actions and reactions of others, by reducing the complexity and ambiguity in the situation, by exploiting the leverage inherent in concentrating effort on a pivotal or decisive aspect of the situation, and by creating policies and actions that are coherent, each building on the other rather tha

A fundamental ingredient in a strategy is a judgment or anticipation concerning the thoughts and/or behavior of others.

Steve Jobs’s answer that day—“to wait for the next big thing”—is

always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.

there is a widespread misconception that a business strategy is some sort of long-range sketch of a desired destination. I encourage you to think of strategy as a journey through, over, and around a sequence of challenges.

My strong advice for a company seeking profitable growth is to restrict your purposes to two: to acquire skills and technologies (including growing platforms) that are complementary to the existing strategy and that would be hard to create internally and to provide broader and stronger market access for the target’s products.

The idea that coordination, by itself, can be a source of advantage is a very deep principle. It is often underappreciated because people tend to think of coordination in terms of continuing mutual adjustments among agents. Strategic coordination, or coherence, is not ad hoc mutual adjustment. It is coherence imposed on a system by policy and desig