Sublime

To obtain higher performance, leaders must identify the critical obstacles to forward progress and then develop a coherent approach to overcoming them.

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.”

Alternatives may not be given but must be searched for or imagined.

This section of the book explores a number of fundamental sources of power used in good strategies: leverage, proximate objectives, chain-link systems, design, focus, growth, advantage, dynamics, inertia, and entropy.

strategic leverage arises from a mixture of anticipation, insight into what is most pivotal or critical in a situation, and making a concentrated application of effort.

A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge.

By zeroing in on this one critical issue something might have been accomplished.

high-level proximate objectives create goals for lower-level units, which, in turn, create their own proximate objectives, and so on, in a cascade of problem solving at finer and finer levels of detail.

The most critical anticipations are about the behavior of others, especially rivals.