Executing Strategy Quotes

Whenever I am in a difficult situation where there seems to be no way out, I think about all the times I have been in such situations and say to myself, "I did it before, so I can do it again.

When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.

Today is a new day and it brings with it a new set of opportunities for me to act on. I am attentive to the opportunities and I seize them as they arise. I have full confidence in myself and my abilities. I can do all things that I commit myself to. No obstacle is too big or too difficult for me to handle because what lies inside me is greater than what lies ahead of me. I am committed to improving myself and I am getting better daily. I am not held back by regret or mistakes from the past. I am moving forward daily. Absolutely nothing is impossible for me.

Strategy is really the essence of the boards value proposition to the company. The ability to strategize well is the essence of what makes a board relevant.

Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.

Brands don’t exist in decks; they exist in decisions.

With proper strategy, if you enter a war, you can defeat even the biggest army otherwise you can be defeated by even the smallest army.

The success of a strategy largely depends on it's implementation. You can have a good strategy, you can have a winning game plan, but ultimately you and your team have to implement the strategy and execute and put the game plan into action if your business is going to succeed.

The business landscape is a constantly evolving ecosystem. Changes in the macro environment, such as technological disruptions or changing consumer preferences, can rapidly alter the competitive landscape. A high-performing board needs to be adept at strategic foresight.

The business environment is constantly evolving. Economic fluctuations, technological disruptions, regulatory shifts, and competitive pressures demand that companies be able to adjust their goals and strategies.

Above all, success in business requires two things: a winning competitive strategy, and superb organizational execution. Distrust is the enemy of both. I submit that while high trust won't necessarily rescue a poor strategy, low trust will almost always derail a good one.

In today's global economy, it's essential that businesses efficiently execute on or plug into logistics.

Effective corporate governance ensures that the vision and strategy are aligned, with the board of directors playing a crucial role in defining the vision and overseeing the development and execution of the strategy.

Be creative while inventing ideas, but be disciplined while implementing them.

To be on the same page, we need to be in the same book.

A successful blitz requires a well-thought-out strategy and flawless execution. Similarly, effective corporate governance involves developing and implementing sound strategies that align with the company's goals and values.

I have always been fascinated by the intricate dance of power, strategy, and decision-making that unfolds within the boardroom. It is a microcosm of human interaction, where the fate of companies, communities, and sometimes even nations, is shaped.

articulate and define what has previously remained implicit or unsaid;

Transitioning a business from current state to future state requires clear strategy, adaptability, synergy among all involved and a dedication to execution - among other things.

To pretend to ignore the enemy is the best way to seduce the enemy

In the early stages of a startup, focusing on “execution” will put you out of business. Instead, you need a “learning and discovery” process so you can get the company to the point where you know what to execute.

The hardware of a computer is useless without the right software. Similarly, in an organization the hardware (strategy and structure) is inert without the software (beliefs and behaviors).

While good strategy content is based on a compelling value proposition for buyers with a robust profit proposition for the organization, sustainable strategy execution is based largely on a motivating-people proposition.

(S × E)T = R ([Strategy times Execution] multiplied by Trust equals Results)

The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

So, execution is really the critical part of a successful strategy. Getting it done, getting it done right, getting it done better than the next person is far more important than dreaming up new visions of the future.

Commitment, trust, and voluntary cooperation are not merely attitudes or behaviors. They are intangible capital. They allow companies to stand apart in the speed, quality, and consistency of their execution and to implement strategic shifts fast at low cost.

One idea alone is a tactic, but if it can be executed a number of different ways, it becomes a great strategy.

The best leaders never stop learning.

The Six Steps to Success: 1) Define Success 2) Devise a Plan 3) Execute and Overcome Adversity 4) Measure Results with Key Metrics 5) Revise the Plan 6) Work Hard

life can be organized like a business plan. First you take an inventory of your gifts and passions. Then you set goals and come up with some metrics to organize your progress toward those goals. Then you map out a strategy to achieve your purpose, which will help you distinguish those things that move you toward your goals from those things that seem urgent but are really just distractions. If you define a realistic purpose early on and execute your strategy flexibly, you will wind up leading a purposeful life. You will have achieved self-determination, of the sort captured in the oft-quoted lines from William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus”: “I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul.

You can learn a lot about business by watching sports. Some of the strategies you see being executed in a sports game can actually be translated into business terms and executed to achieve business success.

Strategy is, in essence, problem solving, and the best approach depends upon the specific problem at hand. Your environment dictates your approach to strategy.

When the business environment is competitive, it's often strategy and execution that makes the difference between winners and losers.

If you don't know how to execute, every strategy will fail, even the most promising ones. As one of my former bosses observed: “No strategy is better than its execution.

When there is no coherent strategy, tactics, no matter how flashily executed, become meaningless.

Messages are more often “heard” when the communicator is honest, sincere, and succinct. In other words, say what you mean, and mean what you say.

One IT executive in an investment banking company claimed that 80 percent of his company’s programming code was dedicated to linking disparate systems, as opposed to creating new capabilities.

A promising junior executive of IBM was involved in a risky venture for the company and managed to lose over $10 million in the gamble. It was a disaster. When Watson called the nervous executive into his office, the young man blurted out, 'I guess you want my resignation?' Watson said, 'You can't be serious. We've just spent $10 million educating you!

Executives are paralyzed by the muddle. Few employees deep down in the company even know what the strategy is. And a closer look reveals that most plans don’t contain a strategy at all but rather a smorgasbord of tactics that individually make sense but collectively don’t add up to a unified, clear direction that sets a company apart—let alone makes the competition irrelevant. Does this sound like the strategic plans in your company?

Consider an AI that has hedonism as its final goal, and which would therefore like to tile the universe with “hedonium” (matter organized in a configuration that is optimal for the generation of pleasurable experience). To this end, the AI might produce computronium (matter organized in a configuration that is optimal for computation) and use it to implement digital minds in states of euphoria. In order to maximize efficiency, the AI omits from the implementation any mental faculties that are not essential for the experience of pleasure, and exploits any computational shortcuts that according to its definition of pleasure do not vitiate the generation of pleasure. For instance, the AI might confine its simulation to reward circuitry, eliding faculties such as a memory, sensory perception, executive function, and language; it might simulate minds at a relatively coarse-grained level of functionality, omitting lower-level neuronal processes; it might replace commonly repeated computations with calls to a lookup table; or it might put in place some arrangement whereby multiple minds would share most parts of their underlying computational machinery (their “supervenience bases” in philosophical parlance). Such tricks could greatly increase the quantity of pleasure producible with a given amount of resources.

Board of Directors members should each bring something unique to the table; and they should share their uniqueness with the rest of the board to inform key decisions.

In an ExO world, purpose trumps strategy and execution overrides planning.

Most companies that win don't have a unique strategy; quite the opposite, they are doing what everyone else is doing but have figured out how to execute better.

I catch the idea by two senses. But when I read aloud I hear what is read and I see it, and hence two senses get it and I remember it better, if I do not understand it better.

If you can’t describe your strategy in twenty minutes, simply and in plain language, you haven’t got a plan.

Strategy is Circular it is not linear

A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.” The

It is your duty to advance the aims of the organization and also to help those who serve it. If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens you can never regain their respect and esteem

In all other construction disciplines, engineers plan a construction strategy that craftmen execute. Engineers don't build bridges; ironworkers do. Only in software is the engineer tasked with actually building the product. Only in software is the "ironworker" tasked with determining how the product will be constructed.

We become blinded by arrogance when we’re utterly convinced of our strengths and our strategies. We get paralyzed by doubt when we lack conviction in both. We can be consumed by an inferiority complex when we know the right method but feel uncertain about our ability to execute it. What we want to attain is confident humility: having faith in our capability while appreciating that we may not have the right solution or even be addressing the right problem. That gives us enough doubt to reexamine our old knowledge and enough confidence to pursue new insights.

It is easier and far more satisfying to retreat and compose yourself after every score—and execute perfectly choreographed plays—than to swarm about, arms flailing, and contest every inch of the basketball court. Underdog strategies

Brainstorm your big idea(s). (2 hrs) Identify your product, customer, competition, and sales/marketing strategy. (2 hrs) Identify your plan for operations, management, capitalization, and finances. (4 hrs) Create a life plan. (4 hrs) Validate your business idea. (8 hrs) Type up your finished business plan. (4 hrs) Execute and follow through on your plan.

He says, "It's just a hat." But it's not just a hat. It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net and conspiracy theory culture and the white working class and social atomism and reality television and fake news and the prison-industrial complex and celebrity culture and the girl in fourth grade who told Jess that since she--Jess--was "naturally unclean" she couldn't come over for birthday cake, and executive compensation, and mediocre white men, and the guy in college who sent around an article about how people who listen to Radiohead are smarter than people who listen to Missy Elliott and when Jess said "That's racist" he said "No,it's not," and of bigotry and small pox blankets and gross guys grabbing your butt on the subway, and slave auctions and Confederate monuments and Jim Crow and fire hoses and separate but equal and racist jokes that aren't funny and internet trolls and incels and golf courses that ban women and voter suppression and police brutality and crony capitalism and corporate corruption and innocent children, so many innocent children, and the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and birthers and flat-earthers and states' rights and disgusting porn and the prosperity gospel and the drunk football fans who made monkey sounds at Jess outside Memorial Stadium, even though it was her thirteenth birthday, and Josh--now it makes her think of Josh.

Above all, success in business requires two things: a winning competitive strategy, and superb organizational execution. Distrust is the enemy of both.” I submit that while high trust won’t necessarily rescue a poor strategy, low trust will almost always derail a good one.

Frederick consistently used his central position to concentrate against one fraction of the enemy, and he always employed tactics of indirect approach. Thereby he gained many victories. But his tactical indirect approach was geometrical rather than psychological-unprepared by the subtler forms of surprise favoured by Scipio-and for all their executive skill, these manoeuvres were narrow. The opponent might be unable to meet the following blow, owing to the inflexibility of his mind or his formations, but the blow itself did not fall unexpectedly.

A Strategy, no matter how beautifully crafted, has to be executed by and with the people. Therefore, Invest in the people. Communicate the vision and strategy to them. Give them the opportunity to demonstrate how their day-to-day activities contribute to the organisation's strategy

Trust, honesty, and integrity are exceedingly important qualities because they so strongly affect followers. Most individuals need to trust others, especially their boss. Subordinates must perceive their leader as a consistently fair person if they’re to engage in the kind of innovative risk-taking that brings a company rewards.

Automation promises to execute certain tasks with superhuman speed and precision. But its brittle limitations reveal themselves when the unexpected arises. Studies consistently show that, as overseers, humans make for fickle partners to algorithms. Charged with monitoring for rare failures, boredom and passivity render human supervision unreliable.

Strategy is important. Execution is imperative. However, the most overlooked aspect in team sports, and what most coaches and leaders fail to grasp, is the fact that it is your culture that will determine whether your strategy works and is sustainable. It is the culture you create that is going to determine whether your players perform and execute.

When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a “drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.” So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great high road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause really be a just one. On the contrary, assume to dictate to his judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart; and tho’ your cause be naked truth itself . . . you shall no more be able to [reach] him, than to penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him, even to his own best interest. [Italics added]

When you’ve decided what your best life looks like and execute that vision, you won’t be envious.

The best way to predict your future is to create it.

Everything from battle strategies and executions to interrogations and torture fall into my line of work as the expected Enforcer. All glimpses into my bright future.

No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent,

Any chief executive who hires a consultant to give them strategy should be fired.

In God we trust; all others must bring data. ~ W. Edwards Deming

A win is in the past as soon as it has happened, so we need to measure ourselves in terms of our understanding of the process and our execution of the key variables.

The parent of every great and lasting decision is a thought. Therefore, contemplate deeply and thoroughly and then execute.

Execution strategies: do / buy / delegate / forget.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” ~ Mark Twain

If there are no new ideas, there is no innovation. And if there is no creativity, there are no new ideas.

The good news is that you can minimize the bias preserved by AI, but this comes as a joint responsibility between leaders, domain experts, and developers.

Ensuring the company's sustainable success requires integrating value creation considerations into all aspects of board oversight.

If a business is underperforming, then the assumptions are wrong

A “Wait and See” approach to an external factor is not strategic

Would you rather have a smaller portion of something large or the whole portion of a business that is not going anywhere

Relationship Awareness: How do people interpret your business’s story

I am a leader, therefore I lead; I am an executive, therefore I execute; I am a human being, therefore I care.

Dream big, make a strategy, work hard, and stand out from the crowd.

Everyone has skills and talent, but not everyone has a strategy.

Every desire demands a strategy. Desire without a strategy is just a waste of time.

One who has a strategy is never disappointed but full of confidence and enthusiasm.

Even the person who says “I don’t know how but I will achieve this” also has a strategy.

No "offense" should be taken, as "none" has been given.

Gen. George Patton said, “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.

Without strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless.

With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.

To reach your organization’s tipping point and execute blue ocean strategy, you must alert employees to the need for a strategic shift and identify how it can be achieved with limited resources. For a new strategy to become a movement, people must not only recognize what needs to be done, but they must also act on that insight in a sustained and meaningful way. How

But people are much more likely to trust a leader if they know he is compassionate and forgiving of mistakes. And trust, of course, is the essential building block for successful relationships.

Imagine what you want to create—without limitation. Design a strategy to make your dream a new reality. Execute your strategy and smash through obstacles. Amplify your vision to create the impact you seek.

Paranoia is acceptable in the new friendship paradigm. Worrying that your best employees or customers might leave is ok, as long as you put in place an active strategy to offset any possibility of that scenario.

Winning is not determined in practice by talent or work ethic... In fact, only half the successful executives I've worked with are competent when measured in conventional terms. The other half get there a different way.

marketing strategy is a clear explanation of how you’re going to get there, not where or what “there” is. An effective marketing strategy is a concise explanation of your stated plan of execution to reach your objectives.

The moment you understand who you will have to spend the rest of your life with and learn to accept it, you’ll eliminate self-judgment, which will empower you to make more bold moves. It will minimize overthinking and increase execution.

Increased brand awareness online requires a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing content that is relevant and consistent with the message you want to convey in an attempt to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.

James MacGregor Burns wrote that “the Leader’s fundamental act is to induce people to be aware or conscious of what they feel – to feel their true needs so strongly, to define their values so meaningfully, that they can be moved to purposeful action.

Grove continued to act on the conviction that good strategic thinking requires different points of view and clarifying those different points of view requires intensive, ongoing debate involving the executive team and domain experts inside and outside the company.

If you would not spend time looking at it, do not ship it. One of the best quality assurance rules of thumb is to avoid publishing content that you would not consume. Simple, yet so hard to execute on. My audience deserves my very best. Repeat that to yourself every single day.

In order to lead a successful marketing and communications campaign, you must support key customer relations initiatives, integrate creative methods of branding, oversee execution of effective publicity, and focus on media pitching that will support PR and Social Media strategies.

What were needed were simple psychological tactics and strategies that worked in the field to calm people down, establish rapport, gain trust, elicit the verbalization of needs, and persuade the other guy of our empathy. We needed something easy to teach, easy to learn, and easy to execute.

The only way you can motivate people is to communicate with them.” Effective communication also shapes values for people by “not only bringing company philosophy to life . . . ,” as Peters and Austin put it, but also “helps newcomers understand how shared values affect individual performance.

Chess is 99 per cent tactics. If you don’t pay attention to the tactics, no strategy you devise will fetch you rewards. Strategy can’t compensate for mistakes in execution. If you persist with neat execution, it will keep you in the game even if you’re not able to follow a broader strategy. Strategy without tactics, though, falls at the first hurdle. For me, strategizing for a game isn’t about putting together a specific manoeuvre of pieces. It’s about thinking what my opponent could be aiming for, knowing what my objectives are and then preparing to get what I want out of the game.

Beyond the pitch, the must successful Public Relations agencies are BOSS because they know the power of strategic execution and can be trusted to get the job done. They have broad affiliations and talented staff who know their industry, and are willing to try new ways to reach a wider audience.

Voluntary cooperation is more than mechanical execution, where people do only what it takes to get by. It involves going beyond the call of duty, wherein individuals exert energy and initiative to the best of their abilities—even subordinating personal self-interest—to execute resulting strategies.3

Jim Crookes, chief architect at BT, has observed, “Companies get the systems they deserve. A company’s systems estate is a result of its culture, organizational history, and its funding structures. Coherent, well-integrated systems will only ever exist in companies that value coherence and integrated service.

In the years between 2002 and 2009, there was no centralized national military strategy for Afghanistan—none. A strategy refers to a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. An overarching strategy for any conflict unifies and directs all of its elements to work toward the execution of that strategy, facilitating the accomplishment of the intended goal. In the absence of a strategy, military organizations, especially ones composed of diverse multidimensional and multinational forces such as those in Afghanistan, operate in an unsynchronized fashion, never accomplishing or achieving their intended goals.

Peter Drucker, the business guru, criticized business executives for devoting too much time to planning, rather than understanding the nature of the corporation itself. As he put it, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” The output of any organization, driven by its culture, must reflect the leadership’s values in order to be effective.

It seems self-evident that a leader must have a vision, develop a strategy, and put a plan in place to bring the vision to reality. The concept is simple, but the execution is extremely difficult. It is difficult because it requires a leader’s full attention, and with all leaders, there are a hundred things a day that divert your attention.

principles of masterful planning 1. Be clear on purpose. 2. Start with an accurate assessment of today. 3. Create a shared vision of success. 4. Identify your critical successful factors and barriers. 5. Define the drivers: your strategies and priorities. 6. Monitor and report results. 7. Have rewards and consequences to build accountability.

I recommend that you focus on both substance and process of your goals. I believe that both are equally important: by setting a high-quality SMART goal you will enable yourself to be conscious and your actions will carry more meaning; meanwhile, it is the execution of the SMART goals strategy that separates achievers from the rest of the people.

Many companies enter businesses planning to capture only a small percentage of the market. Such plans are not conservative; they are extremely dangerous. They are strategies for failure. The only good plans and the only good marketing programs are those aimed at dominance, backed by sufficient resources to achieve it, and executed with precision.

There is a time and place for prestige, and a time and place for dominance. Wise leaders are able to pivot back and forth between the two. When executing a plan, dominance can be crucial. But when deciding on a new strategy, or predicting the future, or finding new innovations, you need to hear diverse perspectives. This is where dominance can be disastrous.

is managed by a section of the frontal lobe called the prefrontal cortex, or PFC. Just like it sounds, the PFC is the most forward-facing part of the frontal lobe. This is where some of our most human faculties lie: planning, personality, rule learning, and other “executive” functions that permit us to live in a complex, nuanced world pummeling us with stimuli.

The final element is execution. The only way a strategy can get implemented is if we dedicate resources to it. Good intentions are not enough—you’re not implementing the strategy that you intend if you don’t spend your time, your money, and your talent in a way that is consistent with your intentions. In your life, there are going to be constant demands for your time and attention. How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy. All of these factors—priorities, balancing plans with opportunities, and allocating your resources—combine to create your strategy.

The R6 Resilience Change Management Framework is a cyclical framework that consists of six iterative puzzle pieces: 1. Review the Macro/Micro Changes: This iteration emphasizes the importance of scanning (mostly) the external environment to identify emerging trends, disruptions, and opportunities. By understanding the broader context in which the organization operates, leaders can anticipate future challenges and proactively adapt their strategies. There should never be a time in the organizations existence where it stops reviewing the macro changes. There are times, though, when micro changes (internal) are where the focus needs to be. 2. Reassess the Business’ Capabilities in the Context of Macro Changes: This iteration is fundamentally about “who are we, and how can we really add value?” It also involves a critical evaluation of the organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in light of the identified macro changes. This reassessment helps to identify areas where the organization needs to adapt or transform its capabilities to remain competitive. This iteration is largely inward-looking, focused on the organization. But it tempered with the idea that “how do our capabilities allow us to add value to our customers lives (existing or new).” 3. Redefine Target Market(s) Based on Reassessment of Capabilities: This iteration focuses on aligning the organization's target markets with the evolving needs and preferences of customers, the changing competitive landscape, and the new reality of the businesses capabilities. This may involve identifying new customer segments, developing personalized offerings, creating seamless omnichannel experiences, or approaching the same target market in new ways (offering them new kinds of value, or the same kind of value in new ways). 4. Redirect Capabilities Toward Redefined Target Market: This iteration involves realigning the organization's resources, processes, and strategies to effectively serve the redefined target markets. This may require investments in new technologies, optimization of supply chains, or the development of innovative products and services. 5. Restructure the Organization: This iteration focuses on adapting the organization's structure, culture, and talent to support the desired changes. This may involve creating agile teams, fostering a culture of innovation, or empowering employees to make decisions through new policies. 6. Repeat in Perpetuity – or – Render Paradigm Shift [R6-RPS]: This iteration underscores the importance of continuous monitoring, evaluation, and adaptation. The R6 framework is not a one-time process in response to a change event, but an iterative cycle that enables organizations to remain agile and resilient in the face of ongoing change. Additionally, there are times when before repeating the cycle, a business may want/need to render an external paradigm shift by introducing a product or service or way of doing things that fundamentally changes the market – fundamentally changes the value exchange between customers, employees and organizations.

Your rival has ten weak points, whereas you have ten strong ones. Although his army is large, it is not irresistible. “Yuan Shao is too caught up in ceremony and show while you, on the other hand, are more practical. He is often antagonistic and tends to force things, whereas you are more conciliatory and try to guide things to their proper courses, giving you the advantage of popular support. His extravagance hinders his administrative ability while your better efficiency is a great contribution to the government, granting you the edge of a well-structured and stable administration. On the outside he is very kind and giving but on the inside he is grudging and suspicious. You are just the opposite, appearing very exacting but actually very understanding of your followers’ strengths and weaknesses. This grants you the benefit of tolerance. He lacks commitment where you are unfaltering in your decisions, promptly acting on your plans with full faith that they will succeed. This shows an advantage in strategy and decisiveness. He believes a man is only as good as his reputation, which contrasts with you, who looks beyond this to see what kind of person they really are. This demonstrates that you are a better judge of moral character. He only pays attention to those followers close to him, while your vision is all-encompassing. This shows your superior supervision. He is easily misled by poor advice, whereas you maintain sound judgment even if beset by evil council. This is a sign of your independence of thought. He does not always know what is right and wrong but you have an unwavering sense of justice. This shows how you excel in discipline. He has a massive army, but the men are poorly trained and not ready for war. Your army, though much smaller, is far superior and well provisioned, giving you the edge in planning and logistics, allowing you to execute effectively. With your ten superiorities you will have no difficulty in subduing Yuan Shao.

Any good strategy involves risk. If you think your strategy is foolproof, the fool may well be you. Execution, too, is uncertain — what works in one company with one workforce may have different results elsewhere. Chance often plays a greater role than we think, or than successful managers usually like to admit. The link between inputs and outcomes is tenuous. Bad outcomes don’t always mean that managers made mistakes; and good outcomes don’t always mean they acted brilliantly.

Fortunately, there’s a simple practice that can help you sidestep these inconveniences and make it much easier to regularly enjoy rich phone conversations. I learned it from a technology executive in Silicon Valley who innovated a novel strategy for supporting high-quality interaction with friends and family: he tells them that he’s always available to talk on the phone at 5:30 p.m. on weekdays. There’s no need to schedule a conversation or let him know when you plan to call—just dial him up.

The principles of war are the same as those of a siege. Fire must be concentrated on one point, and as soon as the breach is made, the equilibrium is broken and the rest is nothing.' Subsequent military theory has put the accent on the first clause instead of on the last: in particular, on the words 'one point' instead of on the word 'equilibrium'. The former is but a physical metaphor, whereas the latter expresses the actual psychological result which ensures 'that the rest is nothing'. His own emphasis can be traced in the strategic course of his campaigns. The word 'point' even, has been the source of much confusion, and more controversy. One school has argued that Napoleon meant that the concentrated blow must be aimed at the enemy's strongest point, on the ground that this, and this only, ensures decisive results. For if the enemy's main resistance be broken, its rupture will involve that of any lesser opposition. This argument ignores the factor of cost, and the fact that the victor may be too exhausted to exploit his success-so that even a weaker opponent may acquire a relatively higher resisting power than the original. The other school-better imbued with the idea of economy of force, but only in the limited sense of first costs-has contended that the offensive should be aimed at the enemy's weakest point. But where a point is obviously weak this is usually because it is remote from any vital artery or nerve centre, or because it is deliberately weak to draw the assailant into a trap. Here, again illumination comes from the actual campaign in which Bonaparte put this maxim into execution. It clearly suggests that what he really meant was not 'point', but 'joint'-and that at this stage of his career he was too firmly imbued with the idea of economy of force to waste his limited strength in battering at the enemy's strong point. A joint, however, is both vital and vulnerable. It was at this time too, that Bonaparte used another phrase that has subsequently been quoted to justify the most foolhardy concentrations of effort against the main armed forces of the enemy. 'Austria is our most determined enemy....Austria overthrown, Spain and Italy fall of themselves. We must not disperse our attacks but concentrate them.' But the full text of the memorandum containing this phrase shows that he was arguing, not in support of the direct attack upon Austria, but for using the army on the frontier of Piedmont for an indirect approach to Austria.

Execution must be insightfully focused on the most critical aspects of a challenge, or those which unlock other critical actions. For example, if category expansion is critical to value creation in a particular strategy, plans should focus disproportionally on how to achieve this. For example, former Mars president Paul Michaels shares in Your Strategy Needs a Strategy: “The job of strategy for a segment leader like us is to drive category growth, and that’s the thing you should be thinking about all the time.

Traits of Companies That Attract Intrapreneurs 1. Their executives are comfortable taking calculated risks and encouraging creativity. 2. Their compensation plan incentivizes innovation and outstanding performers. 3. Their executives play offense (improve) instead of just playing defense (cover their asses). 4. Their executives elevate potential stars rather than hold them back. 5. Their executives actively seek out ideas from all layers of the organization. 6. Their executives actively look for young talent to keep the company vibrant and innovative.

Having outgrown its Manhattan headquarters, most of Bell Labs moved to two hundred rolling acres in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Mervin Kelly and his colleagues wanted their new home to feel like an academic campus, but without the segregation of various disciplines into different buildings. They knew that creativity came through chance encounters. “All buildings have been connected so as to avoid fixed geographical delineation between departments and to encourage free interchange and close contact among them,” an executive wrote.11 The corridors were extremely long, more than the length of two football fields, and designed to promote random meetings among people with different talents and specialties, a strategy that Steve Jobs replicated in designing Apple’s new headquarters seventy years later. Anyone walking around Bell Labs might be bombarded with random ideas, soaking them up like a solar cell. Claude Shannon, the eccentric information theorist, would sometimes ride a unicycle up and down the long red terrazzo corridors while juggling three balls and nodding at colleagues.III It was a wacky metaphor for the balls-in-the-air ferment in the halls.

The key questions answered by tipping point leaders are as follows: What factors or acts exercise a disproportionately positive influence on breaking the status quo? On getting the maximum bang out of each buck of resources? On motivating key players to aggressively move forward with change? And on knocking down political roadblocks that often trip up even the best strategies? By single-mindedly focusing on points of disproportionate influence, tipping point leaders can topple the four hurdles that limit execution of blue ocean strategy. They can do this fast and at low cost. Let

What I like about stochastic gradient descent is how nuts it sounds. Imagine, for instance, that the president of the United States made decisions without any kind of global strategy; rather, the nations chief executive is surrounded by a crowd of shouting subordinates, each hollering for policy to be tweaked in a way that suits their own particular interest. And the president, every day, chooses one of those people at random to listen to, and changes course accordingly. That would be a ridiculous way for a person to run major world government, but it works pretty well in machine learning!

To offer growth as a cause, growth for its own sake, is like eating just to get fat. It pushes executives to consider strategies that demonstrate growth with little to no consideration of any sense of purpose for that growth. Just like it would affect a human being, it should come as no surprise that the organizations that eat to get fat will eventually suffer from health problems. Growth as a cause often results in an unhealthy culture, one in which short-termism and selfishness reign supreme, while trust and cooperation suffer. Growth is a result, not a Cause. It’s an output, not a reason for being.

There is a real danger in believing it when people use the word “genius”—and it’s even more dangerous when we let hubris tell ourselves we are one. The same goes for any label that comes along with a career: are we suddenly a “filmmaker,” “writer,” “investor,” “entrepreneur,” or “executive” because we’ve accomplished one thing? These labels put you at odds not just with reality, but with the real strategy that made you successful in the first place. From that place, we might think that success in the future is just the natural next part of the story—when really it’s rooted in work, creativity, persistence, and luck.

There is a real danger in believing it when people use the word “genius”—and it’s even more dangerous when we let hubris tell ourselves we are one. The same goes for any label that comes along with a career: are we suddenly a “film-maker,” “writer,” “investor,” “entrepreneur,” or “executive” because we’ve accomplished one thing? These labels put you at odds not just with reality, but with the real strategy that made you successful in the first place. From that place, we might think that success in the future is just the natural next part of the story—when really it’s rooted in work, creativity, persistence, and luck.

So much was expected of the true strategist: a student of the present who must be aware of the past, sensitive to the possibilities of the future, conscious of the danger of bias, alert to ambiguity, alive to chaos, ready to think through consequences of alternative courses of action, and then able to articulate all this with sufficient precision for those who must execute its prescriptions.2 This was a counsel of perfection. There was only so much knowledge that an individual could accumulate, assimilate, and manipulate; only so many potential sequences of events that could be worked through in a system that was full of uncertainty, complexity, and chaos.

From Bourcet he learnt the principle of calculated dispersion to induce the enemy to disperse their own concentration preparatory to the swift reuniting of his own forces. Also, the value of a 'plan with several branches', and of operating in a line which threatened alternative objectives. Moreover, the very plan which Napoleon executed in his first campaign was based on one that Bourcet had designed half a century earlier. Form Guibert he acquired an idea of the supreme value of mobility and fluidity of force, and of the potentialities inherent in the new distribution of an army in self-contained divisions. Guibert had defined the Napoleonic method when he wrote, a generation earlier: 'The art is to extend forces without exposing them, to embrace the enemy without being disunited, to link up the moves or the attacks to take the enemy in flank without exposing one's own flank.' And Guibert's prescription for the rear attack, as the means of upsetting the enemy's balance, became Napoleon's practice. To the same source can be traced Napoleon's method of concentrating his mobile artillery to shatter, and make a breach at, a key point in the enemy's front. Moreover, it was the practical reforms achieved by Guibert in the French army shortly before the Revolution which fashioned the instrument that Napoleon applied. Above all, it was Guibert's vision of a coming revolution in warfare, carried out by a man who would arise from a revolutionary state, that kindled the youthful Napoleon's imagination and ambition. While Napoleon added little to the ideas he had imbibed, he gave them fulfilment. Without his dynamic application the new mobility might have remained merely a theory. Because his education coincided with his instincts, and because these in turn were given scope by his circumstances, he was able to exploit the full possibilities of the new 'divisional' system. In developing the wider range of strategic combinations thus possible Napoleon made his chief contribution to strategy.

especially in the key task of translating broad strategic concepts into feasible operational orders. Marshall understood that Eisenhower had a talent for implementing strategy. And that job, Marshall believed, was more difficult than designing it. “There’s nothing so profound in the logic of the thing,” he said years later, discussing his own role in winning approval for the Marshall Plan. “But the execution of it, that’s another matter.” In other words, successful generalship involves first figuring out what to do, then getting people to do it. It has one foot in the intellectual realm of critical thinking and the other in the human world of management and leadership. It

Executives who complain about “execution” problems have usually confused strategy with goal setting. When the “strategy” process is basically a game of setting performance goals—so much market share and so much profit, so many students graduating high school, so many visitors to the museum—then there remains a yawning gap between these ambitions and action. Strategy is about how an organization will move forward. Doing strategy is figuring out how to advance the organization’s interests. Of course, a leader can set goals and delegate to others the job of figuring out what to do. But that is not strategy. If that is how the organization runs, let’s skip the spin and be honest—call it goal setting.

To “trip out,” you have to trip up your frontal lobes. Although creativity arises from the frontal lobes, it almost always takes a backseat to the dominant responsibility of those same lobes: the executive and planning function that aims to get through the day as efficiently as possible. So with time, mental habits take hold that reinforce efficient behavior by forming preferential electrical pathways and networks, like freeways directing the major flow between major cities. What psychedelics are thought to do is to disassemble the freeways temporarily, leaving only a dense and evenly distributed network of roads. This dissolution greatly expands the diversity of connections and, as a result, allows unexpected and original thoughts.

received a message on LinkedIn from an IBM executive who wrote, “Pat, I’ve been at IBM for a while and I have been following your content for a few years. I make good money, but I really want to be an entrepreneur. However, I have a wife and three kids and I’m kind of worried about them. What should I do?” We emailed back and forth for a while, and I asked him questions about who he wanted to be. He began to see that intrapreneurship looked like the ideal choice for him. This is when you’re part of a company and create a new business unit, lead a new initiative, or work out incentives that reward you for driving growth and innovation. In some cases, it might just mean being so indispensable that a company has to pay you equity to retain you.

In the book The Hard Thing About Hard Things, author Ben Horowitz points out that there is “no recipe for really complicated, dynamic situations. . . . That’s the hard thing about hard things . . . there is no formula for dealing with them . . . but there are bits of advice and experience that can help with the hard things.” It’s the same with getting scrappy. What makes this kind of effort stand out is the very fact that it can’t be bottled and sold on a shelf. But we can learn from those who have gone before us and benefit from their experience. Below you will find a quick road map of our journey. The content of this book will be divided into three sections exploring attitude, strategy, and execution. Here’s how the chapters will unfold in the pages ahead:

I ask why they picked that particular failing strategy. A common answer: They say that they heard that it was a perfect strategy, an A-strategy, for getting word out about a company. Everyone is using it. What they haven’t taken into account, though, is their own disposition, talents, and resources. Their own readiness. Businesses are like individuals. What’s perfect for one is awful for another. There is no such thing as an objective “A-strategy.” An A-strategy is only an A-strategy if you’ll execute on it. If you don’t have the desire, talent, or resources to fully execute, then your B- or C-strategy should be elevated to A-strategy status. Execute on the strategy you’ll perform with gusto. Gusto matters. Excitement matters. Follow-through matters. Completion matters.

For Captain Barber, this presented a moral dilemma. He was aware that Chinese battlefield strategy included playing dead in order to lure a Marine into proximity and then kill him, and he considered this premeditated murder. But did this tactic give him the right, in order to protect his own men, to summarily execute wounded enemy soldiers? His company was taking a severe beating on this hill, and he could not afford to lose even one more Marine in this way. If the enemy surrendered, that was one thing—although how many men he could spare to guard prisoners was another complicating factor he’d have to figure out later. For now, however, he issued orders to put all “dead” and wounded Chinese out of their misery. Such were the exigencies of war and the burden of command in combat.

If you gather a team of experienced leaders and ask them why past projects failed, the explanations flow readily: The project was bigger than we realised . . . we were too slow . . . our design was flawed . . . we were operating from faulty assumptions . . . the market changed . . . we had the wrong people . . . our technology didn’t work . . . our strategy was unclear . . . our costs were too high . . . our organisation sabotaged us . . . the competition was tougher than we thought . . . we reorganised ourselves to death . . . we fought among ourselves . . . our strategy was flawed . . . our strategy was good but our execution was lousy . . . we ran into unexpected bottlenecks . . . we misunderstood our customers . . . we were short on resources . . . the economics didn’t work . . . we got killed by internal politics . . .

He had chosen to spend his days in the world of men. Life was what mattered, its slow, priceless pulse, its burning fragility; his debt lay with those importunate Flanders echoes that had never really left him. The private could aspire to be a general because both general and private, at their best, recognized the dire importance of strategy, fortitude, the value of their imperiled existence; but when the machinist became the executive he left the world of tangibles and human conjugacy and entered a shadow world of credits and consols - a world that seemed to reward nothing so much as irresponsibility and boundless greed. And when the thunder rolled down upon them - as he knew it would - how would he feel, playing with paper, striving to outwit his fellows, drinking imported Scotch evenings and listening to the brittle parade of comedians on radio ...?

HSBC's executives saw an emerging class of global rich as the bank's path to prosperity. The superwealthy were increasingly stateless. They banked in Geneva. Lived in London and New York. Shopped in Paris and Milan. And they held their assets through offshore companies registered in places like the British Virgin Islands. HSBC executives were reading the telltale signs of a new age of inequality, even if they didn't recognize it as such. Governments were retreating from providing their citizens pension and health organizations, and HSBC strategy report observed. The stateless rich balked at paying taxes in their home countries, to which they felt little allegiance. It made sense to them to base their operations inside tax havens and to bank in Switzerland, where discretion was woven into the country's DNA. These trends represented an opportunity for the wealth management industry.

you’re a leader with no power over business strategy and no ability to allocate people to important tasks, you’re at best at the mercy of your influence with other executives and managers, and at worst a figurehead. You can’t give up the responsibility of management without giving up the power that comes with it. The CTO who doesn’t also have the authority of management must be able to get things done purely by influencing the organization. If the managers won’t actually give people and time to work on the areas that the CTO believes are important, he is rendered effectively powerless. If you give up management, you’re giving up the most important power you ever had over the business strategy, and you effectively have nothing but your organizational goodwill and your own two hands. My advice for aspiring CTOs is to remember that it’s a business strategy job first and foremost. It’s also a management job.

Instead of focusing on getting more resources, tipping point leaders concentrate on multiplying the value of the resources they have. When it comes to scarce resources, there are three factors of disproportionate influence that executives can leverage to dramatically free resources, on the one hand, and multiply the value of resources, on the other. These are hot spots, cold spots, and horse trading. Hot spots are activities that have low resource input but high potential performance gains. In contrast, cold spots are activities that have high resource input but low performance impact. In every organization, hot spots and cold spots typically abound. Horse trading involves trading your unit’s excess resources in one area for another unit’s excess resources to fill remaining resource gaps. By learning to use their current resources right, companies often find they can tip the resource hurdle outright. What

The Hendrith Business Ideation Framework is a five-step process designed to help entrepreneurs and business leaders generate and develop successful business ideas. The framework begins by emphasizing the importance of establishing a value basis for the product or service, ensuring it offers genuine value to the customer. Next, it highlights the need to estimate the market, including identifying the target audience and evaluating their willingness to pay. The third step focuses on imagining efficient delivery, which involves determining if the business can effectively and profitably deliver the product or service to the market. The fourth step involves evaluating the profitability of the proposed idea, ensuring it can generate revenue and sustain the business. Finally, the framework concludes with execution, where the idea is put into action and brought to market, requiring capital, a robust strategy, and actionable steps.

In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.

The governor is like the boy I saw once at the launching of a ship. When everything was ready, they picked out a boy and sent him under the ship to knock away the trigger and let her go. At the critical moment everything depended on the boy. He had to do the job well by a direct, vigorous blow, and then lie flat and keep still while the ship slid over him. The boy did everything right; but he yelled as if he were being murdered, from the time he got under the keel until he got out. I thought the skin was all scraped off his back; but he wasn’t hurt at all. The master of the yard told me that this boy was always chosen for that job, that he did his work well, that he never had been hurt, but that he always squealed in that way. That’s just the way with the governor. Make up your minds that he is not hurt, and that he is doing his work right, and pay no attention to his squealing. He only wants to make you understand how hard his task is, and that he is on hand performing

Leaders, some of whom are politicians in this book while others are soldiers, must be able to master four major tasks.2 Firstly, they need comprehensively to grasp the overall strategic situation in a conflict and craft the appropriate strategic approach – in essence, to get the big ideas right. Secondly, they must communicate those big ideas, the strategy, effectively throughout the breadth and depth of their organization and to all other stakeholders. Thirdly, they need to oversee the implementation of the big ideas, driving the execution of the campaign plan relentlessly and determinedly. Lastly, they have to determine how the big ideas need to be refined, adapted and augmented, so that they can perform the first three tasks again and again and again. The statesmen and soldiers who perform these four tasks properly are the exemplars who stand out from these pages. The witness of history demonstrates that exceptional strategic leadership is the one absolute prerequisite for success, but also that it is as rare as the black swan.

When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a “drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.” So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great high road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause really be a just one. On the contrary, assume to dictate to his judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart; and tho’ your cause be naked truth itself . . . you shall no more be able to [reach] him, than to penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him, even to his own best interest. [Italics

At the reception given by Jinnah on 14 August 1947 when Asghar Khan and Lt Col (later Maj. Gen.) Akbar Khan met Jinnah, Khan told Jinnah that they were disappointed that the higher posts in the armed forces had been given to British officers who still controlled their destiny. According to Asghar Khan, ‘the Quaid who had been listening patiently raised his finger and said, “Never forget that you are the servants of the state. You do not make policy. It is we, the people’s representatives, who decide how the country is to be run. Your job is only to obey the decision of your civilian masters.”’4 Could any politician have the temerity to say this to the army chief today? The answer has to be a resounding no. Hence, democratic governance in Pakistan instead of being a tripod of the executive, legislature and judiciary looks more like a garden umbrella in which the army is the central pole around which the other organs of the state revolve. Consequently, civilian governments in Pakistan have neither defined national security objectives nor developed strategies to implement them.

Flattery was a prime department store strategy for cultivating customers, and men got a heavy dose. Males could expect to be treated like busy executives and discriminating men of the world. Men’s sections, floors, and entire stores were designed to resemble opulent clubs, often outfitted with wood-paneled grills that women customers were not permitted to enter. Vandervoort’s and Filene’s went to somewhat unusual lengths in furnishing a men’s lounge and smoking room, oddly working against the prevailing assumption that men had no time to spare. In Halle’s new men’s store of the late 1920s, dark mahogany paneling and carved marble detailing created the ambience of a priestly inner sanctum. Filene’s furnished an indoor putting green in its men’s store of 1928. Wanamaker’s outdid itself in 1932, the unlucky Depression year it opened its luxurious six-story men’s store in the Lincoln-Liberty building, with stocks of British imports and an equestrian shop too. Both Wanamaker’s and Marshall Field sold airplanes. Lord & Taylor reserved its tenth floor in New York City for men, with heman departments for cutlery, the home bar, and barbecue equipment. Gimbels, Macy’s, and Hearn’s stuck to more basic appeals, using their large liquor departments to attract men.

By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements. Sears, for example, failed to move from department stores to discount retailing; IBM couldn’t shift from mainframe to minicomputers. The companies that solved the innovator’s dilemma, Christensen wrote, succeeded when they “set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.”9 Drawing lessons directly from the book, Bezos unshackled Kessel from Amazon’s traditional media organization. “Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” Bezos underscored the urgency of the effort. He believed that if Amazon didn’t lead the world into the age of digital reading, then Apple or Google would. When Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the company’s first piece of hardware, an electronic reading

During his time working for the head of strategy at the bank in the early 1990s, Musk had been asked to take a look at the company’s third-world debt portfolio. This pool of money went by the depressing name of “less-developed country debt,” and Bank of Nova Scotia had billions of dollars of it. Countries throughout South America and elsewhere had defaulted in the years prior, forcing the bank to write down some of its debt value. Musk’s boss wanted him to dig into the bank’s holdings as a learning experiment and try to determine how much the debt was actually worth. While pursuing this project, Musk stumbled upon what seemed like an obvious business opportunity. The United States had tried to help reduce the debt burden of a number of developing countries through so-called Brady bonds, in which the U.S. government basically backstopped the debt of countries like Brazil and Argentina. Musk noticed an arbitrage play. “I calculated the backstop value, and it was something like fifty cents on the dollar, while the actual debt was trading at twenty-five cents,” Musk said. “This was like the biggest opportunity ever, and nobody seemed to realize it.” Musk tried to remain cool and calm as he rang Goldman Sachs, one of the main traders in this market, and probed around about what he had seen. He inquired as to how much Brazilian debt might be available at the 25-cents price. “The guy said, ‘How much do you want?’ and I came up with some ridiculous number like ten billion dollars,” Musk said. When the trader confirmed that was doable, Musk hung up the phone. “I was thinking that they had to be fucking crazy because you could double your money. Everything was backed by Uncle Sam. It was a no-brainer.” Musk had spent the summer earning about fourteen dollars an hour and getting chewed out for using the executive coffee machine, among other status infractions, and figured his moment to shine and make a big bonus had arrived. He sprinted up to his boss’s office and pitched the opportunity of a lifetime. “You can make billions of dollars for free,” he said. His boss told Musk to write up a report, which soon got passed up to the bank’s CEO, who promptly rejected the proposal, saying the bank had been burned on Brazilian and Argentinian debt before and didn’t want to mess with it again. “I tried to tell them that’s not the point,” Musk said. “The point is that it’s fucking backed by Uncle Sam. It doesn’t matter what the South Americans do. You cannot lose unless you think the U.S. Treasury is going to default. But they still didn’t do it, and I was stunned. Later in life, as I competed against the banks, I would think back to this moment, and it gave me confidence. All the bankers did was copy what everyone else did. If everyone else ran off a bloody cliff, they’d run right off a cliff with them. If there was a giant pile of gold sitting in the middle of the room and nobody was picking it up, they wouldn’t pick it up, either.” In

The symposium was a closed-doors, synod-style assembly of people who would never have mixed otherwise. My first surprise was to discover that the military people there thought, behaved, and acted like philosophers—far more so than the philosophers we will see splitting hairs in their weekly colloquium in Part Three. They thought out of the box, like traders, except much better and without fear of introspection. An assistant secretary of defence was among us, but had I not known his profession I would have thought he was a practitioner of skeptical empiricism. Even an engineering investigator who had examined the cause of a space shuttle explosion was thoughtful and open-minded. I came out of the meeting realising that only military people deal with randomness with genuine, introspective intellectual honesty—unlike academics and corporate executives using other people's money. This does not show in war movies, where they are usually portrayed as war-hungry autocrats. The people in front of me were not the people who initiate wars. Indeed, for many, the successful defence policy is the one that manages to eliminate potential dangers without war, such as the strategy of bankrupting the Russians through the escalation in defence spending. When I expressed my amazement to Laurence, another finance person who was sitting next to me, he told me that the military collected more genuine intellects and risk thinkers than most if not all other professions. Defence people wanted to understand the epistemology of risk.

Effective off-sites provide executives an opportunity to regularly step away from the daily, weekly, even monthly issues that occupy their attention, so they can review the business in a more holistic, long-term manner. Topics for reflection and discussion at a productive Quarterly Off-Site Review might include the following: Comprehensive Strategy Review: Executives should reassess their strategic direction, not every day as so many do, but three or four times a year. Industries change and new competitive threats emerge that call for different approaches. Reviewing strategies annually or semiannually is usually not often enough to stay current. Team Review: Executives should regularly assess themselves and their behaviors as a team, identifying trends or tendencies that may not be serving the organization. This often requires a change of scenery so that executives can interact with one another on a more personal level and remind themselves of their collective commitments to the team. Personnel Review: Three or four times a year, executives should talk, across departments, about the key employees within the organization. Every member of an executive team should know whom their peers view as their stars, as well as their poor performers. This allows executives to provide perspectives that might actually alter those perceptions based on different experiences and points of view. More important, it allows them to jointly manage and retain top performers, and work with poor performers similarly. Competitive and Industry Review: Information about competitors and industry trends bleeds into an organization little by little over time. It is useful for executives to step back and look at what is happening around them in a more comprehensive way so they can spot trends that individual nuggets of information might not make clear. Even the best executives can lose sight of the forest for the trees when inundated with daily responsibilities.

Why, he asked, do all of our policing efforts have to be so reactive, so negative, and so after the fact? What if, instead of just focusing on catching criminals—and serving up ever harsher punishments—after they committed the crime, the police devoted significant resources and effort to eliminating criminal behavior before it happens? To quote Tony Blair, what if they could be tough on crime but also tough on the causes of crime?3 Out of these questions came the novel idea for Positive Tickets, a program whereby police, instead of focusing on catching young people perpetrating crimes, would focus on catching youth doing something good—something as simple as throwing litter away in a bin rather than on the ground, wearing a helmet while riding their bike, skateboarding in the designated area, or getting to school on time—and would give them a ticket for positive behavior. The ticket, of course, wouldn’t carry a fine like a parking ticket but instead would be redeemable for some kind of small reward, like free entry to the movies or to an event at a local youth center—wholesome activities that also had the bonus of keeping the young people off the streets and out of trouble. So how well did Richmond’s unconventional effort to reimagine policing work? Amazingly well, as it turned out. It took some time, but they invested in the approach as a long-term strategy, and after a decade the Positive Tickets system had reduced recidivism from 60 percent to 8 percent. You might not think of a police department as a place where you would expect to see Essentialism at work, but in fact Ward’s system of Positive Tickets is a lesson in the practice of effortless execution. The way of the Nonessentialist is to go big on everything: to try to do it all, have it all, fit it all in. The Nonessentialist operates under the false logic that the more he strives, the more he will achieve, but the reality is, the more we reach for the stars, the harder it is to get ourselves off the ground. The way of the Essentialist is different. Instead of trying to accomplish it all—and all at once—and flaring out, the Essentialist starts small and celebrates progress. Instead of going for the big, flashy wins that don’t really matter, the Essentialist pursues small and simple wins in areas that are essential.

Between 2003 and 2008, Iceland’s three main banks, Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki, borrowed over $140 billion, a figure equal to ten times the country’s GDP, dwarfing its central bank’s $2.5 billion reserves. A handful of entrepreneurs, egged on by their then government, embarked on an unprecedented international spending binge, buying everything from Danish department stores to West Ham Football Club, while a sizeable proportion of the rest of the adult population enthusiastically embraced the kind of cockamamie financial strategies usually only mooted in Nigerian spam emails – taking out loans in Japanese Yen, for example, or mortgaging their houses in Swiss francs. One minute the Icelanders were up to their waists in fish guts, the next they they were weighing up the options lists on their new Porsche Cayennes. The tales of un-Nordic excess are legion: Elton John was flown in to sing one song at a birthday party; private jets were booked like they were taxis; people thought nothing of spending £5,000 on bottles of single malt whisky, or £100,000 on hunting weekends in the English countryside. The chief executive of the London arm of Kaupthing hired the Natural History Museum for a party, with Tom Jones providing the entertainment, and, by all accounts, Reykjavik’s actual snow was augmented by a blizzard of the Colombian variety. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in late 2008 exposed Iceland’s debts which, at one point, were said to be around 850 per cent of GDP (compared with the US’s 350 per cent), and set off a chain reaction which resulted in the krona plummeting to almost half its value. By this stage Iceland’s banks were lending money to their own shareholders so that they could buy shares in . . . those very same Icelandic banks. I am no Paul Krugman, but even I can see that this was hardly a sustainable business model. The government didn’t have the money to cover its banks’ debts. It was forced to withdraw the krona from currency markets and accept loans totalling £4 billion from the IMF, and from other countries. Even the little Faroe Islands forked out £33 million, which must have been especially humiliating for the Icelanders. Interest rates peaked at 18 per cent. The stock market dropped 77 per cent; inflation hit 20 per cent; and the krona dropped 80 per cent. Depending who you listen to, the country’s total debt ended up somewhere between £13 billion and £63 billion, or, to put it another way, anything from £38,000 to £210,000 for each and every Icelander.

When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess—how to manage the little battles to win the war—is called strategy. As Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns—“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.” Thanks to their calculation power, computers are tactically flawless compared to humans. Grandmasters predict the near future, but computers do it better. What if, Kasparov wondered, computer tactical prowess were combined with human big-picture, strategic thinking? In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.

thepsychchic chips clips ii If you think of yourself instead as an almost-victor who thought correctly and did everything possible but was foiled by crap variance? No matter: you will have other opportunities, and if you keep thinking correctly, eventually it will even out. These are the seeds of resilience, of being able to overcome the bad beats that you can’t avoid and mentally position yourself to be prepared for the next time. People share things with you: if you’ve lost your job, your social network thinks of you when new jobs come up; if you’re recently divorced or separated or bereaved, and someone single who may be a good match pops up, you’re top of mind. This attitude is what I think of as a luck amplifier. … you will feel a whole lot happier … and your ready mindset will prepare you for the change in variance that will come … 134-135 W. H. Auden: “Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences.” Pay attention, or accept the consequences of your failure. 142 Attention is a powerful mitigator to overconfidence: it forces you to constantly reevaluate your knowledge and your game plan, lest you become too tied to a certain course of action. And if you lose? Well, it allows you to admit when it’s actually your fault and not a bad beat. 147 Following up on Phil Galfond’s suggestion to be both a detective and a storyteller and figure out “what your opponent’s actions mean, and sometimes what they don’t mean.” [Like the dog that didn’t bark in the Sherlock Holmes “Silver Blaze” story.] 159 You don’t have to have studied the description-experience gap to understand, if you’re truly expert at something, that you need experience to balance out the descriptions. Otherwise, you’re left with the illusion of knowledge—knowledge without substance. You’re an armchair philosopher who thinks that just because she read an article about something she is a sudden expert. (David Dunning, a psychologist at the University of Michigan most famous for being one half of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has found that people go quickly from being circumspect beginners, who are perfectly aware of their limitations, to “unconscious incompetents,” people who no longer realize how much they don’t know and instead fancy themselves quite proficient.) 161-162 Erik: Generally, the people who cash the most are actually losing players (Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan strategy, jp). You can’t be a winning player by min cashing. 190 The more you learn, the harder it gets; the better you get, the worse you are—because the flaws that you wouldn’t even think of looking at before are now visible and need to be addressed. 191 An edge, even a tiny one, is an edge worth pursuing if you have the time and energy. 208 Blake Eastman: “Before each action, stop, think about what you want to do, and execute.” … Streamlined decisions, no immediate actions, or reactions. A standard process. 217 John Boyd’s OODA: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. The way to outmaneuver your opponent is to get inside their OODA loop. 224 Here’s a free life lesson: seek out situations where you’re a favorite; avoid those where you’re an underdog. 237 [on folding] No matter how good your starting hand, you have to be willing to read the signs and let it go. One thing Erik has stressed, over and over, is to never feel committed to playing an event, ever. “See how you feel in the morning.” Tilt makes you revert to your worst self. 257 Jared Tindler, psychologist, “It all comes down to confidence, self-esteem, identity, what some people call ego.” 251 JT: “As far as hope in poker, f#¢k it. … You need to think in terms of preparation. Don’t worry about hoping. Just Do.” 252

A somewhat provocative example of the interconnections between the gaming industry and finance. A technologist working for a large London hedge fund hinted this to me in interview. Trained in computer science and engineering, this interviewee first worked as a network programmer for large online multiplayer games. His greatest challenge was the fact that the Internet is not instantaneous: when a player sends a command to execute in action, it takes time for the signal to reach the computer server and interact with the commands of other players. For the game to be realistic, such delays have to be taken into account when rendering reality on the screen. The challenge for the network programmer is to make these asymmetries as invisible as possible so that the game seem 'equitable to everyone.' The problem is similar in finance, where the physical distance from the stock exchange's matching engines matters tremendously, requiring a similar solution to the problem of latency: simulating the most likely state of the order book on the firm's computers in order to estimate the most advantageous strategies or the firm's trading algorithms. Gaming and finance are linked not through an institutional imperative of culture or capital - or even a strategy, as such - but rather through the more mundane and lowly problems of how to fairly manage latency and connectivity.

The big issue was not strategy but executing strategy. There was plenty of activity, but not much action.

If you want to perform well over both the short and long term, pay close attention to executive leadership in general. As much as you might invest in areas like culture, process transformation, and M&A, you’ll only make progress if you have talented senior leaders who are both committed to the company’s strategies and capable of executing on them. Having the right number of those leaders matters too.

The “guy” says, “Well then, how will my life change?” And the answer is, “Your life will change only when you change.” Whenever I speak, whether I address business executives or high school kids, my message is always the same: “The only way it gets better for you is when you get better.” BETTER IS NOT SOMETHING YOU WISH; IT’S SOMETHING YOU BECOME.

Can’t beat them? Drown them in cash. Almost none of the companies spending so profligately was anywhere near profitable, and the discounts made it difficult for anyone to figure out the natural demand for their product. The deals also made it hard for competitors to keep up. Hodari and other WeWork rivals said they lost only a small chunk of their tenants to WeWork’s marketing blitz, but if the campaign continued, none of them would have the cash reserves to survive what amounted to predatory pricing. Prior to SoftBank’s arrival, back in the era of Managing the Nickel, WeWork executives had been talking about finding a more balanced growth trajectory. T. Rowe Price, which invested in WeWork in 2014, had pushed for a more sustainable strategy and was so skeptical of the SoftBank-funded bonanza that they sold as much as they could when SoftBank agreed to buy stock from existing shareholders.

Daniel Gillion, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies race and politics, examined the Public Papers of the Presidents, a compilation of nearly all public presidential utterances—proclamations, news-conference remarks, executive orders—and found that in his first two years as president, Obama talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961. Obama’s racial strategy has been, if anything, the opposite of radical: He declines to use his bully pulpit to address racism, using it instead to engage in the time-honored tradition of black self-hectoring, railing against the perceived failings of black culture.

By contrast, the role of the executive is to lead managers. For the most part, executives don’t manage individual contributors. Instead, they focus on vision and strategy. Yet they are still connected to the frontline employees because they are also responsible for the “fighting spirit” of their organizations; they need to be role models who help people persist through inevitable adversity.

A still more sobering social media example of a different kind, one so important that it could well have influenced the presidential election of 2016, was the cooperation between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm, was largely the creation of Steve Bannon and his billionaire sponsor, Robert Mercer. One former co-executive referred to Cambridge Analytica as “Bannon’s arsenal of weaponry to wage a culture war on America using military strategies.” Cambridge Analytica combined a particularly vicious version of traditional “dirty tricks” with cutting-edge social media savvy. The dirty tricks, according to its former CEO, Alexander Nix, included bribery, sting operations, the use of prostitutes, and “honey traps” (usually involving sexual behavior, sometimes even initiated for the purposes of obtaining compromising photographs) to discredit politicians on whom it conducted opposition research. The social media savvy included advanced methods developed by the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University. Aleksandr Kogan, a young Russian American psychologist working there, created an app that enabled him to gain access to elaborate private information on more than fifty million Facebook users, information specifically identifying personality traits that influenced behavior. Kogan had strong links to Facebook, which failed to block his harvesting of that massive data; he then passed the data along to Cambridge Analytica. Kogan also taught at the Saint Petersburg State University in Russia; and given the links between Cambridge Analytica and Russian groups, the material was undoubtedly made available to Russian intelligence. So extensive was Cambridge Analytica’s collection of data that Nix could boast, “Today in the United States we have somewhere close to 4 or 5 thousand data points on every individual…. So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people.” Whatever his exaggeration, he was describing a new means of milieu control that was invisible and potentially manipulable in the extreme. Beyond Cambridge Analytica or Kogan, Russian penetration of American social media has come to be recognized as a vast enterprise involving extensive falsification and across-the-board anti-Clinton messages, with special attention given to African American men in order to discourage them from voting. The Russians apparently reached millions of people and surely had a considerable influence on the outcome of the election. More generally, one can say that social media platforms can now create a totality of their own, and can make themselves available to would-be owners of reality by means of massive deception, distortion, and promulgation of falsehoods. The technology itself promotes mystification and becomes central to creating and sustaining cultism. Trump is the first president to have available to him these developments in social media. His stance toward the wild conspiracism I have mentioned is to stop short of total allegiance to them, but at the same time to facilitate them and call them forth in his tweets and harbor their followers at his rallies. All of this suggests not only that Trump and the new social media are made for each other, but also that the problem will long outlive Trump’s brief, but all too long, moment on the historical stage.

● Developing your first-ever leadership strategy and don't know where to start? ● Are you stuck with a particular phase of leadership strategy? ● Having a tough time achieving corporational milestones with your robust strategy? If you're facing these questions and confused regarding canvassing a robust leadership strategy, this article can help you solve these queries. Several factors affect the development of a leadership strategy, such as the influence of decision-making processes for leadership/management, the personnel brought on board for strategy development and the resources involved. There are specific "keys" to effective leadership that help in efficient development and deployment of strategies. Professionals who want to develop robust strategies and move up in their leadership career can opt for online strategy courses. These courses aim to build concepts from the grass-root level, such as what defines a strategy leadership and others. What is a Leadership Strategy? Leadership is required for leading organisational growth by optimising the resources and making the company's procedures more efficient. A leadership strategy explicitly enlists the number of leaders required, the tasks they need to perform, the number of employees, team members and other stakeholders required, and the deadlines for achieving each task. Young leaders who have recently joined the work-force can take help of programs offered by reputable institutes for deepening their knowledge about leadership and convocating successful strategies. Various XLRI leadership and management courses aim to equip new leaders with a guided step-by-step pedagogy to canvass robust leadership strategies. What it Takes to Build a Robust Leadership Strategy: Guided Step-By-Step Pedagogy The following steps go into developing an effective and thriving leadership strategy:- ● Step 1 = Identify Key Business Drivers The first step involves meeting with the senior leaders and executives and identifying the business's critical drivers. Determining business carriers is essential for influencing the outcome of strategies. ● Step 2 = Identifying the Different Leadership Phases Required This step revolves around determining the various leadership processes and phases. Choosing the right techniques from hiring and selection, succession planning, training patterns and others is key for putting together a robust strategy. ● Step 3 = Perform Analysis and Research Researching about the company's different leadership strategies and analysing them with the past and present plans is vital for implementing future strategies. ● Step 4 = Reviewing and Updating Leadership Strategic Plan Fourth step includes reviewing and updating the strategic plan in accordance with recent developments and requirements. Furthermore, performing an environmental scan to analyse the practices that can make strategies long-lasting and render a competitive advantage. All it Takes for Building a Robust Leadership Strategy The above-mentioned step by step approach helps in auguring a leadership strategy model that is sustainable and helps businesses maximise their profits. Therefore, upcoming leaders need to understand the core concepts of strategic leadership through online strategy courses. Moreover, receiving sound knowledge about developing strategies from XLRI leadership and management courses can help aspiring leaders in their careers.

Finally, you get to explain the way you are, and justify staying that way. This payoff, the strongest of the three, is directly connected to the “in order to” column of your Winning Strategy. Indeed, a racket can be thought of as the “dark side” of your Winning Strategy, the side that you would rather dismiss from sight, because you don’t want to acknowledge its hold on you. The film producer who never works up to her potential is running a racket. She can always say to herself, “I could have done more to make that work”—which becomes a handy justification for things staying the way they are. An executive named Jack identified his racket accurately when he said, “I keep telling my people what I want them to do, but in the deep recesses of my mind, I wonder, with a good deal of concern, what would happen if they really did all the things I requested. In my gut, I can’t help but feel I would no longer be necessary. Of course, that’s very human of me and not something that readily comes into my mind, but whether I am aware of it or not, it lives very viscerally for me. Do I really want to be dispensable? I tell myself and everyone else, I want to be dispensable—I harp on it all the time—and yet I have the ugly confrontation with the truth inside my thoughts. The recurring fear is: If I become dispensable, I’ll have to find something else to do.” Jack’s Winning Strategy was listening for “What is the largest possibility?” so as to act by “challenging and arguing,” in order to “be the best and avoid being ordinary.” When he looked at the unwanted condition of being indispensable, saw it as a racket, and asked, “What is the payoff?” he replied, “The payoff is to justify staying the way I am—that is, being indispensable. If I were dispensable, I would be like anyone else—ordinary. And in my Winning Strategy, being ordinary is something that I’m constitutionally unwilling to tolerate.

stretch goals-goals that cannot be achieved by continuing to play by the historical rules. As Jack Welch, the celebrated chief executive of General Electric has observed, "If you know how to get there, it's not it stretch target."i

A Winning Strategy is a lifelong, unconscious formula for achieving success. You did not design this Winning Strategy, it designed you. As a human being and as a leader, it is the source of your success and at the same time the source of your limitations. It defines your reality, your way of being, and your way of thinking. This, in turn, focuses your attention and shapes your actions, thereby determining what’s possible and not possible for you as a leader.

Your Winning Strategy is not what you do. It is the source of what you do. It is a manifestation of who you are being.

Every human being has his or her own Winning Strategy—a Strategy for winning the games of life, for “making it” in life—or even for surviving in life.

For as long as your Winning Strategy is your ground of being, it will never occur to you to take any actions beyond it.

A great idea (or strategy) is often made to seem to be a bad idea (or strategy) by bad execution … or impatience.

Let your strategy be practically executable to realize your prodigy

Richard and his senior executives now devised a cunning strategy, which they outlined in a series of emails. If the true personality of oxycodone was misunderstood by America’s doctors, the company would not correct that misunderstanding. Instead, they would exploit it.

Review your organization’s mission statement, vision, and values. Ask your manager to explain how you can contribute to strategic objectives. Pay attention to formal communications from executives and upper management. Stay on top of changes to your firm’s strategy.

Surprisingly, this divergence continues despite the deep influence of Agile and Lean thinking on general—that is, non-IT—management. The disciplines continue to evolve separately even though corporate strategy is increasingly about both agility and IT strategy. The two worlds do not converge, even though IT leadership books advise CIOs to pull themselves closer to strategy formulation and claim a “seat at the table.” But while the other C-level executives around the table are discussing the need for agility, senior IT leaders, eager to gain or retain a seat at the strategy table, are pursuing the path of demonstrating the value of IT ... by locking in old-school practices that encourage rigidity.

Humility is often misunderstood. It’s not a matter of having low self-confidence. One of the Latin roots of humility means “from the earth.” It’s about being grounded—recognizing that we’re flawed and fallible. Confidence is a measure of how much you believe in yourself. Evidence shows that’s distinct from how much you believe in your methods. You can be confident in your ability to achieve a goal in the future while maintaining the humility to question whether you have the right tools in the present. That’s the sweet spot of confidence. We become blinded by arrogance when we’re utterly convinced of our strengths and our strategies. We get paralyzed by doubt when we lack conviction in both. We can be consumed by an inferiority complex when we know the right method but feel uncertain about our ability to execute it. What we want to attain is confident humility: having faith in our capability while appreciating that we may not have the right solution or even be addressing the right problem. That gives us enough doubt to reexamine our old knowledge and enough confidence to pursue new insights.

Creating value for users while asking nothing in return is often a great way to attract members and encourage participation. “Users first, monetization later,” as the slogan goes. Or, in a variant that we heard from the executive in charge of platform strategy for Haier Group, a Chinese manufacturing company, “You never take first money.” In other words, only after a value unit has been created and exchanged with results that are satisfactory to both the producer and the consumer should the platform business itself seek to capture a share of that value.

What’s Slipping Under Your Radar? Word Count: 1096 Summary: Ben, a high-level leader in a multi-national firm, recently confessed that he felt like a bad father. That weekend he had messed up his Saturday daddy duties. When he took his son to soccer practice, Ben stayed for a while to support him. In the process, though, he forgot to take his daughter to her piano lesson. By the time they got to the piano teacher’s house, the next student was already playing. This extremely successful businessman felt like a failure. Keywords: Dr. Karen Otazo, Global Executive Coaching, Leadership Article Body: Ben, a high-level leader in a multi-national firm, recently confessed that he felt like a bad father. That weekend he had messed up his Saturday daddy duties. When he took his son to soccer practice, Ben stayed for a while to support him. In the process, though, he forgot to take his daughter to her piano lesson. By the time they got to the piano teacher’s house, the next student was already playing. This extremely successful businessman felt like a failure. At work, one of Ben’s greatest strengths is keeping his focus no matter what. As a strategic visionary, he keeps his eyes on the ongoing strategy, the high-profile projects and the high-level commitments of his group. Even on weekends Ben spends time on email, reading and writing so he can attend the many meetings in his busy work schedule. Since he is so good at multi-processing in his work environment, he assumed he could do that at home too. But when we talked, Ben was surprised to realize that he is missing a crucial skill: keeping people on his radar. Ben is great at holding tasks and strategies in the forefront of his mind, but he has trouble thinking of people and their priorities in the same way. To succeed at home, Ben needs to keep track of his family members’ needs in the same way he tracks key business commitments. He also needs to consider what’s on their radar screens. In my field of executive coaching, I keep every client on my radar screen by holding them in my thinking on a daily and weekly basis. That way, I can ask the right questions and remind them of what matters in their work lives. No matter what your field is, though, keeping people on your radar is essential. Consider Roger, who led a team of gung-ho sales people. His guys and gals loved working with him because his gut instincts were superb. He could look at most situations and immediately know how to make them work. His gut was great, almost a sixth sense. But when Sidney, one of his team of sales managers, wanted to move quickly to hire a new salesperson, Roger was busy. He was managing a new sales campaign and wrangling with marketing and headquarters bigwigs on how to position the company’s consumer products. Those projects were the only things on his radar screen. He didn’t realize that Sidney was counting on hiring someone fast. Roger reviewed the paperwork for the new hire. It was apparent to Roger that the prospective recruit didn’t have the right background for the role. He was too green in his experience with the senior people he’d be exposed to in the job. Roger saw that there would be political hassles down the road which would stymie someone without enough political savvy or experience with other parts of the organization. He wanted an insider or a seasoned outside hire with great political skills. To get the issue off his radar screen quickly, Roger told Human Resources to give the potential recruit a rejection letter. In his haste, he didn’t consult with Sidney first. It seemed obvious from the resume that this was the wrong person. Roger rushed off to deal with the top tasks on his radar screen. In the process, Sidney was hurt and became angry. Roger was taken by surprise since he thought he had done the right thing, but he could have seen this coming.

Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, clearly agrees, as a 2012 video interview shows. “I very frequently get the question ‘What’s going to change in the next ten years?’” he said. “I almost never get the question ‘What’s not going to change in the next ten years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two. Because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.

A good game is overwhelming and all-consuming. It requires a person to focus on it exclusively, inviting one to weaponize one’s intellect and personality completely. It requires you to be logical and to execute strategy, but also to be flexible and to learn from momentary setbacks, changing your plans in the face of new information. It requires you to be social and to make alliances, or else to go it alone in the face of unified opposition for the thrill of being a game-steering villain. A good game becomes its own world, colonizing your mind and invading your dreams.

MacIver notes that octopuses, while underwater creatures, seem to maximize the extent of their sensory capacities. They have very large eyes, and tend to remain still while executing complex tasks. It’s dangerous being an octopus; from the point of view of a predatory sea-dweller, you are a vulnerable bag of delicious nutrients. To survive, they have had to develop innovative defensive strategies, camouflaging themselves by changing skin color and emitting clouds of ink when forced to flee. Intelligence is a part of that defensive arsenal; an octopus will hide among rocks and coral when it sleeps, often arranging pieces so as to better shield itself from view. Perhaps the evolutionary pressure that led to large octopus brains was of a completely different type from that which led to land-dwelling animals.

No strategy is better than its execution.

Strategy can't really be mastered until you know how to execute well.

If you can't trust one of your executives to set the strategy for his or her sphere of responsibility, all the consultants in the world can't fix that problem.

great execution can make a moderately successful strategy go a long way, but poor execution will fail even the most brilliant

What do executives love best about customer delight? The fact that it is highly contagious. Just ask David Vélez, CEO of Brazil’s Nubank, the world’s largest independent digital bank. Nubank gains more than 40,000 customers each day, 80 percent of them through referrals from existing customers.

I believe that all successful organizations share two qualities: they are smart, and they are healthy. An organization demonstrates that it is smart by developing intelligent strategies, marketing plans, product features, and financial models that lead to competitive advantage over its rivals. It demonstrates that it is healthy by eliminating politics and confusion, which leads to higher morale, lower turnover, and higher productivity.

organizational health is relatively hard to measure, and even harder to achieve. It feels soft to executives who prefer more quantitative and reliable methods of steering their companies. It also entails a longer lead time to implementation than does a technical or marketing strategy, which yields more immediate results and gratification.

This is the strategy paradox. The main cause of strategic failure, Raynor argues, is not bad strategy, but great strategy that just happens to be wrong. Bad strategy is characterized by lack of vision, muddled leadership, and inept execution—not the stuff of success for sure, but more likely to lead to persistent mediocrity than colossal failure.

Whatever route you choose to success, vision, passion and persistence will get you there.

Vision mission: What was the original market or technology insight that led you to create this company? Customers: Who do you envision buying this product or service? Who will use it? Problem statement: What’s the problem you think you can solve for your potential customers? Use cases: What are the specific ways people will use this product or service to solve their problem? Product/solution: Give a detailed explanation of the technology behind the solution—what does it do now, and what else is it capable of doing? Ecosystem: In many cases there are other companies involved in solving the problem or adding additional value. These companies form an ecosystem around the problem and solution. What are all the companies and where in the ecosystem are the control points where one company has leverage? Competition: Who else is trying to solve this problem—or, if no one else sees the problem yet, who might jump in to compete with you to solve the problem once you identify it? Business model: How will your product or service change business for your customers? Will it increase their return on investment or reduce costs in a significant way? Or does it allow them to do something that couldn’t have been done with prior technology, creating huge value? Sales and go-to-market: Enterprise companies should articulate how the product or solution will make its way to the market. Through a sales force? Through distribution partners? Both? For a consumer company, how will users find out about your solution? From app stores? Search? Viral adoption? Growth hacking techniques? Advertising? PR? Organization: How is the company organized? Who are the major influencers on the company? How are decisions made? What kind of culture will work? Funding strategy: What’s the next funding event? A private financing? An IPO? How much runway does the company have before it needs more money and what kind of funding is in place to execute against the category strategy?

Execute your own shift and create a future with more value for your customers and stakeholders.

Execution doesn't guarantee you anything unless people notice and reward you for it. And they often won't. The company may benefit from your execution but the people that make up the company care about self-preservation, job security, and their own advancement. Your execution is not what motivates them on a daily basis. The rub lies in the fact that they ultimately form the decision-making engine for the corporation.

Your company's success is not a pre-requisite for your personal success... Most of my own advancement has come in the time of corporate failure and not success. And this principle is a key weapon in the arsenal of the incompetent executive who rises through the ranks while you tread waters.

Winning is not determined in practice by talent or work ethic... In fact, only half the successful executives I've worked with are competent when measured in conventional terms. The other half gets there a different way.

You have a brand. We provide awareness. From the media strategy to the execution. Bannering, social campaigns, influencer marketing have no secrets for us. You sell products. We bring you clients.Selling online is finally way harder than it looked right? We have had our own e-commerce, so we know. You provide services. We generate leads. You have a nice and shiny website, some traffic but hard time to get people to request your services.