Sublime

bad strategy is vacuous and superficial, has internal contradictions, and doesn’t define or address the problem. Bad strategy generates a feeling of dull annoyance when you have to listen to it or read it.

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 strat

The coordination of action provides the most basic source of leverage or advantage available in strategy.

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 part is judgment about which issues are truly important and which are secondary. The second part is judgment about the difficulties of dealing with these issues. And the third part is the ability to focus, to avoid spreading resources too thinly, not trying to do everything at once. The combination of these three parts lead to a focus on

we always hope that a brilliant insight or very clever design will allow us to accomplish several apparently conflicting objectives with a single stroke, and occasionally we are vouchsafed this kind of deliverance. Nevertheless, strategy is primarily about deciding what is truly important and focusing resources and action on that objective. It is a

A good strategy recognizes the nature of the challenge and offers a way of surmounting it.