Sublime

use your relative advantages to impose out-of-proportion costs on the opposition and complicate his problem of competing with you.

A critical challenge that does not seem easily addressable deserves great attention. Can it be divided into subproblems? Is it like any similar problem others have faced? Is there anyone who might be an expert on such situations? What is changing that might alter its addressability? What is the single keystone constraint, which if broken, would mak

Treating strategy like a problem in deduction assumes that anything worth knowing is already known—that only computation is required.

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

siren song of template-style strategy—filling in the blanks with vision, mission, values, and strategies. This path offers a one-size-fits-all substitute for the hard work of analysis and coordinated action.

Bad strategy tends to skip over pesky details such as problems. It ignores the power of choice and focus, trying instead to accommodate a multitude of conflicting demands and interests. Like a quarterback whose only advice to teammates is “Let’s win,” bad strategy covers up its failure to guide by embracing the language of broad goals, ambition, vi

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

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.

As long as strategy remained at the level of intent and concept, the conflicts among various values and between the organization and the initiative remained tolerable. It was the imperative of action that forced a decision about which issue was actually the most important.