Guy Kawasaki has an interview with Michael Raynor who wrote, "The Strategy Paradox: Why Committing to Success Leads to Failure (and What To Do About It)"
Here are two Q/A's, but read the full article for a better overview.
After reading the article I just felt like the author went around in circles...what is he really saying? I left a comment on the blog along these lines....Question: How does your answer change with respect to a start-up?
Answer: Start-ups tend to be enormously resource constrained. Typically they are not able to devote money and time to the problems of strategic uncertainty. As a result, start-ups tend to be “bet the farm†propositions: high risk, with the potential of high reward. Such firms don’t manage strategic risk, they accept it.
Question: Are you saying that by definition a startup is resource constrained, so it should/has to bet the farm on one approach?
Answer: The degree to which you manage risk will be a function of your ability to bear risk and recover from setbacks. On the continuum from the archetypal “two people in a garage†to Johnson & Johnson, I take the counter-intuitive view that start-ups are much better able to bear risk: if the venture fails, the people and other resources involved are typically far more easily redeployed than is the case with large corporations.
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From you questions I just get the feeling that he is talking in circles. Basically, we can't predict the future so we have to evaluate the risk of any strategy.
Maybe (I don't know) we often tend to focus too much on strategy (which is based on a whole bunch of unknowns) and forget about tactics...what we're doing. Obviously the two are closely intertwined - strategy leads to tactics, outcomes of tactics lead to re-evaluation of strategy and so forth.
Maybe it all comes down to Jim Collins (Good to Great, http://www.jimcollins.com) concept of the flywheel. Each move should be continuously adding to the momentum. Another example is Toyota as explained by Matthew May (http://www.changethis.com/29.01.ElegantSolutions) which you've highlighted here before.
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What do you think?
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