Sublime

Strategy therefore requires making explicit choices—to do some things and not others—and building a business around those choices.

Indeed, professional services firms have grown so quickly in part because they are organized around projects, whereas their clients are organized around permanent jobs.

effective CEO/coach might say,

For other projects, the order of activities changed dramatically. The “what would have to be true?” question revealed that certain issues had to be addressed right away, rather than after lots of additional spending had been done on less important questions. From there, I used the most important question in

When we ask leaders what they would do differently looking back, their most frequent response is, “I would have made changes in my executive team more quickly.” They hang on to low-ratio return, high-cost leaders for too long, and it costs them dearly. Having the right people on the leadership team and investing in the Leadership Agenda is high lev

just a few years ago. As an argument for the power of design thinking, that's hard to top.

It may seem hard to believe that there are only two possible ways to win—low cost or differentiation.

In this chapter I’ll lay out a seven-step approach to strategy-making anchored in the structured formulation of a set of well-articulated hypotheses—or strategic possibilities—for strategists to choose between.

Talented executives can grow market share and sales, increase margins, and use capital more efficiently, but no matter how good they are, they can’t increase shareholder value if expectations get out of line with reality. The harder a CEO is pushed to increase shareholder value, the more the CEO will be tempted to make moves that actually hurt the