A great strategy is more than an aspiration, more than a dream: It’s a system of value creation, a set of mutually reinforcing parts. Anchored by a compelling purpose, it tells you where a company will play, how it will play, and what it will accomplish.
Strategy—the system of value creation that underlies a company’s competitive position and uniqueness—has to be embraced as something open, not something closed. It is a system that evolves, moves, and changes.
Purpose is where performance differences start. Nothing else is more important to the survival and success of a firm than why it exists, and what otherwise unmet needs it intends to fill. It is the first and most important question a strategist must answer. Every concept of strategy that has entered the conversation of business managers—sustainable competitive advantage, positioning, differentiation, added value, even the firm effect—flows from purpose.
Many people believe a strategist’s primary job is thinking. It isn’t. The number-one job is setting an agenda and putting in place the organization to carry it out.
Richard’s argument about OxyContin mirrored the libertarian position of a firearms manufacturer who insists that he bears no responsibility for gun deaths. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. It is a peculiar hallmark of the American economy that you can produce a dangerous product and effectively off-load any legal liability for whatever destruction that product may cause by pointing to the individual responsibility of the consumer. “Abusers aren’t victims,” Richard said. “They are the victimizers.”
At the turn of the nineteenth century, an apothecary’s assistant in Prussia had conducted a series of experiments in which he managed to isolate the chemical alkaloids in opium and synthesize the drug. He named this new substance morphine, after Morpheus, from Greek mythology—the god of dreams.
But the original House of Sackler was built on Valium, and it seems significant, and revealing, that for the rest of his life Arthur would downplay his association with the drug, emphasizing his achievements in other areas and deliberately obscuring (or leaving out altogether) the fact that his first fortune was made in medical advertising.
“The doctor is feted and courted by drug companies with the ardor of a spring love affair,” one commentator observed. “The industry covets his soul and his prescription pad because he is in a unique economic position; he tells the consumer what to buy.”
The Constitution itself has very little to say about federal elections, besides generally leaving them to state control unless Congress provides otherwise, and Congress for the most part hadn’t.ii More than that, the Constitution doesn’t expressly confer a right to vote, as such.
Adam Green, the founder of a progressive grassroots organization, told me. “When nobody is the most important person in the room, everyone who enters the room gains power and the convener gains influence,” he said.
another word for tension is politics. When you hear people saying that things are getting “political,” that often means that problems have arisen because the data or process hasn’t led to the best decision.
Bill looked for four characteristics in people. The person has to be smart, not necessarily academically but more from the standpoint of being able to get up to speed quickly in different areas and then make connections. Bill called this the ability to make “far analogies.” The person has to work hard, and has to have high integrity. Finally, the person should have that hard-to-define characteristic: grit. The ability to get knocked down and have the passion and perseverance to get up and go at it again.
As managers, we tend to focus on the problem at hand. What is the situation? What are the issues? What are the options? And so on. These are valid questions, but the coach’s instinct is to lead with a more fundamental one. Who was working on the problem? Was the right team in place? Did they have what they needed to succeed? “When I became CEO of Google,” Sundar Pichai says, “Bill advised me that at that level, more than ever before, you need to bet on people. Choose your team. Think much harder about that.”
it’s a manager’s job to push the team to be more courageous. Courage is hard. People are naturally afraid of taking risks for fear of failure. It’s the manager’s job to push them past their reticence. Shona Brown, a longtime Google executive, calls it being an “evangelist for courage.”
When his team was confronted with a challenging decision, Eric liked to use a management technique he called the “rule of two.” He would get the two people most closely involved in the decision to gather more information and work together on the best solution, and usually they would come back a week or two later having decided together on the best course of action. The team almost always agreed with their recommendation, because it was usually quite obvious that it was the best idea. The rule of two not only generates the best solution in most cases, it also promotes collegiality. It empowers the two people who are working on the issue to figure out ways to solve the problem, a fundamental principle of successful mediation.
THE THRONE BEHIND THE ROUND TABLE THE MANAGER’S JOB IS TO RUN A DECISION-MAKING PROCESS THAT ENSURES ALL PERSPECTIVES GET HEARD AND CONSIDERED, AND, IF NECESSARY, TO BREAK TIES AND MAKE THE DECISION.
