Sound strategy is the province of brand and category leaders who influence culture and transform lives — bending the market in their direction while doing it. This is all too rare.
Here’s one of the most popular and least effective management methods: a strategy template that starts with a company’s Vision and Mission and cascades down to Strategies and Objectives. This strategy template has many problems, such as not mentioning customers’ priorities or your competitive strengths (these should be foundational!). It often produces vague, generic results that avoid making difficult choices.
I just talked to a guy who flipped a ping pong joint into a $50M tech company.
Did you know that Stanford University can point to over 5,000 companies that have their roots at Stanford? That list includes favorite companies like Google, Nike, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, LinkedIn, Uber, IDEO, Intel, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Charles Schwab, Yahoo!, Gap, Tesla, even the Special Olympics. These companies generate annual global revenues of $2.7 trillion, an amount equivalent to the world’s tenth largest nation.
If strategy is future competitive advantage, generosity is smart for individual or company strategies. Generosity builds good will which is both an asset and a moat.
