"Nelson’s challenge was that he was outnumbered. His strategy was to risk his lead ships in order to break the coherence of his enemy’s fleet. With coherence lost, he judged, the more experienced English captains would come out on top in the ensuing melee. Good strategy almost always looks this simple and obvious and does not take a thick deck of PowerPoint slides to explain. It does not pop out of some "strategic management" tool, matrix, chart, triangle, or fill-in-the-blanks scheme. Instead, a talented leader identifi es the one or two critical issues in the situation—the pivot points that can multiply the effectiveness of effort—and then focuses and concentrates action and resources on them."

“It is commonly accepted that successful performance of a firm hinges on restricting activities to cultivating a related and familiar range rather than 'bold moves into uncharted'.”

“A leader’s most important job is creating and constantly adjusting this strategic bridge between goals and objectives.”

“common skill, market or resource applies to each.”

“The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action.”

“Given that background, I was interested in what Steve Jobs might say about the future of Apple. His survival strategy for Apple, for all its skill and drama, was not going to propel Apple into the future. At that moment in time, Apple had less than 4 percent of the personal computer market. The de facto standard was Windows-Intel and there seemed to be no way for Apple to do more than just hang on to a tiny niche.”

“A major advancement in the strategy field is the development of models where firm heterogeneity is an endogenous creation of economic actors.”