Categories
Book notes from Strategy Rules – five timeless lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove and Steve Jobs
- Look forward to develop a vision for the future; reason back to set boundaries and priorities
- Look forward to anticipate customer needs; reason back to match with capabilities
- Four things visionaries excel at: i) anticipate competitors moves ii) anticipate industry inflection point iii) committing to a vision and staying the course (despite initially weak products and other disappointments along the way) iv) Learning from history
- Build platforms and ecosystems – not just products. Goal to build industry wide platforms that bring together a broad ecosystem of partners engaged in complimentary product and service innovation
- Make big bets without betting the company
- Bet big to change the game
- Don’t bet the company – timed and segmented their biggest bets to mitigate the risks at any one time
- Cannibalize your own business – microsoft deciding to build a dos killer i.e, windows, ipod -> iphone. Control the pace of cannibalization.
- Cut your losses: All too often failure leads to paralysis and a stubborn refusal to admit past mistakes. Visionaries understood the importance of cutting their losses and moving forward. Example:
- Steve job’s decision to abandon Apple’s most successful product to build a GUI
- Changing the strategy of iPhone to include 3rd party apps. If Jobs stuck to his initial decision of not allowing 3rd party apps, the iPhone would have been doomed to a small niche
