Quotes about Strategy

The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do, now that my master is taking away my position? I am too weak to dig and too ashamed to beg.

I know what I will do, so that after my removal from management, people will welcome me into their homes.’

Ad Hoc Strategic Meetings In some cases, a strategic or critical issue that gets raised in a Weekly Tactical meeting cannot wait for the next Monthly Strategic meeting on the schedule. Still, that doesn't mean it should be taken up during that Weekly Tactical.

Another challenge in making strategic meetings work is the failure to do research and preparation ahead of time. The quality of a strategic discussion, and the decision that results from it, are improved greatly by a little preliminary work. This eliminates the all-too-common reliance on anecdotal decision making. The key to ensuring that preparation occurs is to let team members know as far in advance as possible what issues will be discussed during the Monthly or Ad Hoc Strategic.

The key to managing this challenge, of course, is to identify a reasonable number of issues that will have the greatest possible impact on the success of your organization, and then spend most of your time thinking about, talking about, and working on those issues.

Well, strategy. The competitive landscape. Morale. The dynamics of the executive team. Top performers. Bottom performers. Customer satisfaction. Pretty much everything that has a long-term impact on the success of the company. Stuff you just can't cover in weekly or monthly meetings.

See, management is an everyday thing. Strategy and financial reporting and planning are not.

Once a leadership team has become cohesive and worked to establish clarity and alignment around the answers to the six critical questions, then, and only then, can they effectively move on to the next step: communicating those answers. Or better yet, overcommunicating those answers—over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Companies often wonder what to outsource and what not to. One possible answer: outsource any job that's not directly exposed to competitive pressure, because outsourcing it will thereby expose it to competitive pressure. (I mean "outsource" in the sense of hiring another company to do it, not the more specific sense of hiring an overseas company.)

Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him.

Measurement and Leverage To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.

Treat a startup as an optimization problem in which performance is measured by number of users.