Ag Industry Quotes

In short, strategy is choice. More specifically, strategy is an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.

Six Strategy Traps 1) The do-it-all strategy: failing to make choices, and making everything a priority. Remember, strategy is choice. 2) The Don Quixote strategy: attacking competitive "walled cities" or taking on the strongest competitor first, head-to-head. Remember, where to play is your choice. Pick somewhere you can have a choice to win. 3) The Waterloo Strategy: starting wars on multiple fronts with multiple competitors at the same time. No company can do everything well. If you try to do so, you will do everything weakly. 4) The something-for-everyone strategy: attempting to capture all consumer or channel or geographic or category segments at once. Remember, to create value, you have to choose to serve some constituents really well and not worry about the others. 5) The dreams-that-never-come-true strategy: developing high-level aspirations and mission statements that never get translated into concrete where-to-play and how-to-win choices, core capabilities, and management systems. Remember that aspirations are not strategy. Strategy is the answer to all five questions in the choice cascade. 6) The program-of-the-month strategy: settling for generic industry strategies, in which all competitors are chasing the same customers, geographies, and segments in the same way. The choice cascade and activity system that supports these choices should be distinctive. The more your choices look like those of your competitors, the less likely you will ever win.

Six Telltale Signs of a Winning Strategy 1) An activity system that looks different from any competitor's system. It means you are tempting to deliver value in a distinctive way. 2) Customers who absolutely adore you, and noncustomers who can't see why anybody would buy from you. This means you have been choiceful. 3) Competitors who make a good profit doing what they are doing. It means your strategy has left where-to-play and how-to-win choices for competitors, who don't need to attack the heart of your market to survive. 4) More resources to spend on an ongoing basis than competitors have. This means you are winning the value equation and have the biggest margin between price and costs and best capacity to add spending to take advantage of an opportunity to defend your turf. 5) Competitors who attack one another, not you. It means that you look like the hardest target in the (broadly defined) industry to attack. 6) Customers who look first to you for innovations, new products, and service enhancement to make their lives better. This means that your customers believe that you are uniquely positioned to create value for them.

Strategy can seem mystical and mysterious. It isn't. It is easily defined. It is a set of choices about winning. Again, it is an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition. Specifically, strategy is the answer to these five interrelated questions: 1. What is your winning aspiration? The purpose of your enterprise, its motivating aspiration. 2. Where will you play? A playing field where you can achieve that aspiration. 3. How will you win? The way you will win on the chosen playing field. 4. What capabilities must be in place? The set and configuration of capabilities required to win in the chosen way. 5. What management systems are required? The systems and measures that enable the capabilities and support the choices. These choices and the relationship between them can be understood as a reinforcing cascade, with the choices at the top of the cascade setting the context for the choices below, and choices at the bottom influencing and refining the choices above.

He had paid for his sins—in all the ways that matter. He was saved, as so many men are, by a good woman. But some lives are harder than others, and some sins haunt us, no matter how much we pay for them or how far we sail from them. Maybe this happened to the man and maybe not. Maybe retirement doesn’t suit the industrious. Perhaps there is no solace in rest for a hard-working man.

Porter noted that powerful and sustainable competitive advantage is unlikely to arise from any one capability (e.g., having the best sales force in the industry or the best technology in the industry), but rather from a set of capabilities that both fit with one another (i.e., that don’t conflict with one another) and actually reinforce one another (i.e., that make each other stronger than they would be alone).

Agnes has a patch of land at Hewlands, leased from her brother, stretching from the house where she was born to the forest. She keeps bees here, in hemp-woven skeps, which hum with industrious and absorbed life; there are rows of herbs, flowers, plants, stems that wind up supporting twigs. Agnes’s witch garden, her stepmother calls it, with a roll of her eyes. Agnes can be seen, most weeks, moving up and down the rows of these plants, pulling up weeds, laying her hand to the coils of her hives, pruning stems here and there, secreting certain blooms, leaves, pods, petals, seeds in a leather bag at her hip.

To make good choices, you need to make sense of the complexity of your environment. The strategy logic flow can point you to the key areas of analysis necessary to generate sustainable competitive advantage. First, look to understand the industry in which you play (or will play), its distinct segments and their relative attractiveness. Without this step, it is all too easy to assume that your map of the world is the only possible map, that the world is unchanging, and that no better possibilities exist. Next, turn to customers. What do channel and end consumers truly want, need, and value-and how do those needs fit with your current or potential offerings? To answer this question, you will have to dig deep-engaging in joint value creation with channel partners and seeking a new understanding of end consumers. After customers, the lens turns inward: what are your capabilities and costs relative to the competition? Can you be a differentiator or a cost leader? If not, you will need to rethink your choices. Finally, consider competition; what will your competitors do in the face of your actions? Throughout the thinking process, be open to recasting previous analyses in light of what you learn in a subsequent box. The basic direction of the process is from left to right, but it also has interdependencies that require a more flexible path through it.

They define strategy as following best practices. Every industry has tools and practices that become widespread and generic. Some organizations define strategy as benchmarking against competition and then doing the same set of activities but more effectively. Sameness isn’t strategy. It is a recipe for mediocrity.

JoAnn Bechtold, a prominent businesswoman from Omaha, boasts an impressive track record in the software industry. With Newtek Accounting Systems, Inc. under her belt, she now excels in contract work, focusing on the Ag sector.

Who Funds the AHA? The story of how the American Heart Association came to dominate nutrition thought begins with the very first industry to fund the AHA. As we’ll learn, the AHA was effectively launched with a large sum of money that came straight from the vegetable oil industry. The AHA used this money to support Ancel Keys’s cholesterol theory—and to convince the public to start eating vegetable oils. The AHA continues to receive money from industries selling vegetable oil, and the AHA’s practice guidelines continue to support the vegetable oil industry today. Today, our massive processed food industry depends heavily on vegetable oils, as do the companies that grow most of our foods. The AHA’s top corporate donors now include heavy hitters from Big Ag and Big Food, including Conagra, Monsanto (before the company closed in 2018), LibertyLink, Kellogg’s, Quaker, Tyson, FritoLay, Campbell, and Subway.22 The AHA’s website states that 80 percent of their $1 billion plus annual revenue comes from non-corporate sources. Nevertheless, in 2021, drug and device companies donated just over $40 million, and “other” corporations donated more than $140 million.23 The AHA uses this money in part to support scientists interested in exploring the benefits of vegetable oils, the harms of cholesterol, and new ways to use drugs that lower cholesterol—and to publish and publicize their findings. The money also goes to lobbyists who influence public health policy at the state and national levels.24

And it’s no accident, I’d add, that the transsexual is the only thing that trans can describe that queer can’t. The transsexual is not queer; this is the best thing about her. Take Agnes, the pseudonymous transsexual woman who famously posed as intersex at UCLA’s Gender Identity Clinic in the late fifties in order to obtain access to vaginoplasty. Agnes’s case was chronicled by Harold Garfinkel in an article that’s now taught in trans studies courses. Agnes is regularly celebrated as some kind of gender ninja: savvy, tactical, carefully conning the medical-industrial complex into giving her what she wants. What no one wants to talk about is what she actually wanted: a cunt, a man, a house, and normal fucking life. Whatever intuition she may not have had about gender as a “managed achievement” was put toward a down payment on a new dishwasher. If there’s anything Agnes “reveals” about gender, it’s that actually existing normativity is, strictly speaking, impossible. Norms, as such, do not exist. (If Gender Trouble knew this, it did a poor job explaining it.) That doesn’t mean that norms don’t structure people’s desires; what it means is that the desire for the norm consists, in terms of its lived content, in nonnormative attempts at normativity. Agnes was a nonnormative subject, but that wasn’t because she was “against” the norm; on the contrary, her nonnormativity was what wanting to be normal actually looked like. Like most of us, Agnes was making do in the gap between what she wanted and what wanting it got her. We can argue, and people have, about whether queer theory is possible without antinormativity. But whatever comes after trans studies—can I suggest transsexual theory?—will be impossible with antinormativity. The most powerful intervention scholars working in trans studies can make, at this juncture within the academy, is to defend the claim that transness requires that we understand, as we never have before, what it means to be attached to a norm—by desire, by habit, by survival.

It can be easy to dismiss new and different where-to-play choices as risky, as a poor fit with the current business, or as misaligned with core capabilities. And it is just as easy to write off an entire industry on the basis of the predominant where-to-play choices made by the competitors in that industry. But sometimes, you must dig a bit deeper—to examine unexpected where-to-play choices from all sides—to truly understand what is possible and how an industry can be won with a new place to play.

The strategy logic flow can point you to the key areas of analysis necessary to generate sustainable competitive advantage. First, look to understand the industry in which you play (or will play), its distinct segments and their relative attractiveness.

Again, for your organization, have you used the tools to help you think through your potential choices? Have you used the strategy logic flow framework to understand the industry, channel, and customer values, your own relative capability and cost positions, and competitive reactions in a way that can underpin sustainable where-to-play and how-to-win choices? Have you reverse engineered the strategic possibilities and asked what would have to be true to ensure that this possibility is the one that gives you the best chance to win?

there are some common signs that a winning strategy is in place. Look for these, for your own business and among your competitors. An activity system that looks different from any competitor’s system. It means you are attempting to deliver value in a distinctive way. Customers who absolutely adore you, and noncustomers who can’t see why anybody would buy from you. This means you have been choiceful. Competitors who make a good profit doing what they are doing. It means your strategy has left where-to-play and how-to-win choices for competitors, who don’t need to attack the heart of your market to survive. More resources to spend on an ongoing basis than competitors have. This means you are winning the value equation and have the biggest margin between price and costs and the best capacity to add spending to take advantage of an opportunity or defend your turf. Competitors who attack one another, not you. It means that you look like the hardest target in the (broadly defined) industry to attack. Customers who look first to you for innovations, new products, and service enhancement to make their lives better. This means that your customers believe that you are uniquely positioned to create value for them.

The question needed to be reframed. The next morning, everyone would be given three votes on what constituted the core capabilities of the company, along the following criteria: first, for a given capability, the group had to be reasonably sure P&G already had real, measurable competitive advantage in that area and could widen its margin of advantage in the future. Second, the capability had to be broadly relevant and important to the majority of P&G’s businesses. That is, it had to be a company-level rather than business-level capability that distinguished P&G from its competitors. Third, the capability had to be decisive, a real competitive advantage that was the difference between winning and losing. Ultimately, the question was, what capabilities must P&G, as a global company, have to win across the industries in which it would compete?

Ultimately, there are four dimensions you need to think about to choose where to play and how to win: The industry. What is the structure of your industry and the attractiveness of its segments? Customers. What do your channel and end customers value? Relative position. How does your company fare, and how could it fare, relative to the competition? Competition. What will your competition do in reaction to your chosen course of action?

Strategy therefore requires making explicit choices—to do some things and not others—and building a business around those choices.2 In short, strategy is choice. More specifically, strategy is an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.

Companies often attempt to move out of an unattractive game and into an attractive one through acquisition. Unfortunately, it rarely works. A company that is unable to strategize its way out of a current challenging game will not necessarily excel at a different one—not without a thoughtful approach to building a strategy in both industries. Most often, an acquisition adds complexity to an already scattered and fragmented strategy, making it even harder to win overall.

The “J. Edgar Hoover of public health” has presided over cataclysmic declines in public health, including an exploding chronic disease epidemic that has made the “Fauci generation”—children born after his elevation to NIAID kingpin in 1984— the sickest generation in American history, and has made Americans among the least healthy citizens on the planet. His obsequious subservience to the Big Ag, Big Food, and pharmaceutical companies has left our children drowning in a toxic soup of pesticide residues, corn syrup, and processed foods, while also serving as pincushions for 69 mandated vaccine doses by age 18—none of them properly safety tested.55 When Dr. Fauci took office, America was still ranked among the world’s healthiest populations. An August 2021 study by the Commonwealth Fund ranked America’s health care system dead last among industrialized nations, with the highest infant mortality and the lowest life expectancy.

In April 2014 a settlement agreement was reached in court, and Detroit had to pay $85 million to USB AG and Bank of America Corporation to terminate the swaps. The use of variable-rate instruments, such as swaps, to finance debt was the single "biggest contributing factor to the increase in Detroit's legacy expenses.

Maybe retirement doesn’t suit the industrious. Perhaps there is no solace in rest for a hard-working man.

Are you applying innovation to imagine what your industry landscape could be, not following conventional wisdom that you play only in the landscape as it now exists? Are you using your innovation capability to imagine and conceive new strategic alternatives about where to play?

What is your company best at? Which capabilities are best suited to deliver sustainable competitive advantage for your company in your industry? How can innovation enhance or transform your capabilities to be a growth driver—even a game-changer—in your industry?

Game-changing innovation comes not just from disruptive, “big-bang” product innovations but also from leveraging what your business does best to create competitive advantage. Revamping a business model is not easy; it requires visible, consistent commitment from the top. It takes time. First, the more established an industry’s norms, the more difficult it is to innovate business models. Everyone has a big stake in preserving the status quo, but it is critical to resist the temptation to do so. Next, keep 80 percent to 90 percent of the organization focused on driving the current business model for growth while reserving a small segment to create and qualify the new model. Finally, reject false trade-offs, compromises that people assume must be taken but, in reality, present issues that should be addressed head-on. Use them as a catalyst for identifying opportunities to innovate the current way the industry does business.

Choosing core strengths requires deep thinking and hardheaded choices about what it really takes to win in your industry or market, and then playing to your few real strengths—core capabilities where you already have competitive advantage or can acquire or build competitive advantage. The work of selecting core strengths takes careful analysis, real objectivity, and tough-minded discipline. It is the work of decisive leaders.

A disciplined process for going through iterations improves the chances of success. This doesn’t mean putting an idea through the wringer of a slow-moving bureaucracy. In fact, some of the most successful companies in the fastest-moving industries are the most disciplined at nurturing and commercializing their ideas.

Three external goals were set. 1. Grow twice as fast as the industry; grow one-and-a-half to two times GDP. Each global business unit at P&G sets its own growth target, so, for example, fabric care is different than health care, which is different from feminine care.

Unique core strengths Once we made our choices about where to play, we then focused on how to win by building on, enhancing, and deploying our unique core strengths. Core strengths enable you to play successfully in your industry and are consistent with what your company does or could do best. They create and sustain competitive advantage; they can be integrated in different ways to meet new and unforseen needs. P&G’s core strengths include a deep understanding of consumers and placing them at the center of all decision making; creating and building brands that endure; the ability to create value with customers and suppliers; and effectively leveraging global learning and scale into competitive advantage. We invested serious money, resources, time, and management intensity to make our core strengths stronger.

Inspiring leadership No organization can work without leadership. In the integrated process of innovation, it is the leaders who link all the drivers of innovation together, energize people, and inspire them to new heights. Leaders are instigators. They continually look over the horizon to gauge the changing landscape in their industry. They set the goals that are stretching but achievable and require innovation.

Real innovation can change the context—the market space, the customer space, the competitive space, the societal space—in which a business operates. Changing the game, then, means not being hamstrung by the deep-rooted conventional wisdom of your business and industry, but rather seizing the initiative to imagine a new game or a new space and, thus, shaping and controlling your destiny. Game-changing leaders search for and execute ideas that put the company on a long-term path to prosperity.