The Ledger, every show

“Growth and profit are, they battle each other. Let's say we define profit as return on equity. Well, if you're going to increase growth and increase return on equity, how do you do that? Because you're basically going to invest less to get your return on equit…”

“Bad strategy the standard bad strategy for a corporation is a set of profit goals or performance goals. A set of goals. Now goals are the engineering of how companies work to some extent, but abstract high level goals, they're not a strategy. They're something…”

“Yeah, so if you're, if you've invented ChatGBT, you can bring in the smartest AI people for a year or two. Because, you know, everybody wants, oh, oh, the smart AI people want to work at the cutting edge with the current winner. Then they'll start arguing with…”

“My experience working with companies is that the senior executives have to do this. And my experience is that the senior executives know pretty much everything you need to know to do this. That you don't need, you know, consulting firms to come in and analyze …”

“These are analytical tools for analyzing the problem, for thinking about things, for looking at competition, but they're not strategy.”

“All three elements have to be there. You have to be an understanding of the situation. There has to be a guiding policy. How are we going to deal with it? And that can be a long-term sense of how we compete. I mean, you don't have to change your strategy every…”

“There are companies that say, well, our future is, let's say, something that's not in a software business. That's an industry portfolio. We're going to have, we're investing in the future of robotics and AI and again, computer vision and all that. That's going…”

“So lacking diagnosis is one of the key reasons for bad strategy. The other, the fluff and the incoherent actions are fun to describe, but they're less common. The second major source of a strategy is mistaking goals for strategy.”

“And when the new generative AI, we have the possibility of stronger effects than we've ever seen before. But we don't know yet. But the suspicion is that size is going to matter. That the size of the data that you could put into the learning algorithm is going…”

“They teach theories now because it's so much easier to teach a theory than intellectual structure.”

“My two pieces of advice to anybody that's actually trying to do this is A, state the problem, and B, don't call it a strategy. Call it an action agenda. That you're not creating a strategy. You're creating an action agenda. What are we going to do about this p…”

“Cause it's huge numbers of people out there willing to sell you advice on how to mission and your vision and your values and your, all these things that have to be in place before you can have a strategy. And that's not true.”

“The problem of strategy inside an organization Is diversity of interest and fear of action. Because action, when you do something in an organization of any size, it involves people changing what they do. It involves changing power relationships among humans in…”

“If you go to the bookstore and look at the management section in the bookstore, most of it's about leadership. And the leadership is mostly about perfecting yourself. It's not about leading anybody.”

“A lot of the stuff that's done in home construction is there to create jobs, not to reduce costs.”

“The word priority means the first. It doesn't mean the grab bag of everything that you can think of that might matter. It means what's first.”

“And that sequence is part of strategic action. You need a source of power I say power. I don't say advantage or efficiency. I say power because there are different ways in which power is exhibited. And you have to focus power on a target that can actually be a…”

“It's very hard to think strategically about the situation you're in, because there isn't a science of strategy. It's not like physics. It's not like engineering, where we can write down the equations of stress on a beam and say, how thick does the beam have to…”

“One way it happened was they replaced the engineers who used to run the company with lawyers and accountants. Nothing wrong with lawyers and accountants, but they didn't have a feel for this hardware software set of issues. And another was they put in a matrix…”

“Rockefeller was a robber baron and he built an empire and all that. You learn that in school, but what you don't learn in school is he dropped the cost of a gallon of kerosene from a dollar to 10 cents.”

“I've talked to a couple of consulting firms about, well, you guys like to learn how to do Foundries, and they say, how does it work? It's one guy for three days. That's not what we do. We do 10 guys for three years. It's not a business model. But that's a nice…”

“For a strategy, you need to exploit an asymmetry of some kind. You're a little faster. Oh, they're alone. Something has to be different between the sort of things. So that's the beginning of power is a symmetry. We can think of it as leverage.”

“When Gertzner took over IBM, as it was failing in the face of the microprocession revolution, He recognized that their primary asset, their source of power was that they were respected, and they had umptured into every large corporation on the planet. Nobody e…”