Sublime

The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action.

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

The three strategies I recommend CEOs consider during decision-making meetings are writing versus talking, the loudest voice in the room, and the RAPID method.

Having a coherent strategy—one that coordinates policies and actions. A good strategy doesn’t just draw on existing strength; it creates strength through the coherence of its design.

Phyllis’s insight that “the engineers can’t work without a specification” applies to most organized human effort. Like the Surveyor design teams, every organization faces a situation where the full complexity and ambiguity of the situation is daunting. An important duty of any leader is to absorb a large part of that complexity and ambiguity, passi

a strategy is a coordinated and integrated set of five choices: a winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, core capabilities, and management systems.

Being a general manager, CEO, president, or other top-level leader means having more power and being less constrained. Effective senior leaders don’t chase arbitrary goals. Rather, they decide which general goals should be pursued. And they design the subgoals that various pieces of the organization work toward.

THE IDEA THAT a person or organization has one or two primary driving goals is simply not true. It is a fantasy invented by economists and certain management thinkers. The reality is that most people and organizations have “a bundle of ambitions.”

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.