Cynthia A. Montgomery > Quotes

“Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“having accepted that the only sustainable strategy is one that anticipates change, you’re ready to embrace becoming the strategist who takes your company where it needs to go.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Creating value for others is the surest way to capture some yourself.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“So IKEA created value all around: Vendors could produce and sell for less, customers were pleased with the experience yet able to pay less, and IKEA was able to capture some of that value itself.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“about what a company does and how it does it: • Who we serve • With what sort of products or services • What we do that’s different or better • What enables us to do that”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“If you ask young men what they want to accomplish by the time they are 40, the answers you get fall into two distinct categories. There are those—the great majority—who will respond in terms of what they want to have. This is especially true of graduate students of business administration. There are some men, however, who will answer in terms of the kind of men they hope to be. These are the only ones who have a clear idea of where they are going.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“As a leader, if you ignore or underestimate your crucial, ongoing role as a strategist, something essential in your business will be missing. Answered well over a lifetime, the questions at the heart of strategy will help a company prevail. Answered poorly, or not at all, they leave it adrift and vulnerable. Articulating”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“To be sure, competitive advantage is essential to strategy, and the longer it lasts, the better. But any one advantage, even a company’s underlying system of value creation, is only part of a bigger story, one frame in a motion picture. It is the need to manage across frames, day by day, year over year, that makes a leader’s role in strategy so vital.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“who we are is to a large extent an accumulation of all the choices, large and small, we’ve made through the years of our lives.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Third, whatever you do, don’t underestimate the power of these forces. Their impact on the destiny of your business may well be as great as your own.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“everyone in an organization has a right to understand strategy and a right to be involved in it.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Good communication is not simply sending and receiving. Nor is good communication simply an exchange of data,” he wrote. “The best communication forces you to listen.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Purpose is where performance differences start. Nothing else is more important to the survival and success of a firm than why it exists, and what otherwise unmet needs it intends to fill. It is the first and most important question a strategist must answer. Every concept of strategy that has entered the conversation of business managers—sustainable competitive advantage, positioning, differentiation, added value, even the firm effect—flows from purpose. EFFECTIVE”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Purpose is where performance differences start. Nothing else is more important to the survival and success of a firm than why it exists, and what otherwise unmet needs it intends to fill. It is the first and most important question a strategist must answer. Every concept of strategy that has entered the conversation of business managers—sustainable competitive advantage, positioning, differentiation, added value, even the firm effect—flows from purpose.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“New problems created a dizzying chance,”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Strategy is about serving an unmet need, doing something unique or uniquely well for some set of stakeholders. Beating the competition is critical, to be sure, but it’s the result of finding and filling that need, not the goal.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Our purpose is who we are and what makes us distinctive. It’s what we as a company exist to achieve….”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“It is said that “if you don’t know where you’re going, there isn’t a road that can get you there.” Organizations should exist for a reason.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“From the beginning, IKEA has taken a different path…. It’s not difficult to manufacture expensive fine furniture. Just spend the money and let the customers pay. To manufacture beautiful, durable furniture at low prices is not so easy. It requires a different approach. Finding simple solutions, scrimping and saving in every direction. Except on ideas.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Organizations that have a difference that matters add value. If any of them were to go away, they would be missed. Would yours?”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Does your company matter? That’s the most important question every business leader must answer. If you closed its doors today, would your customers suffer any real loss?1 How long would it take, and how difficult would it be, for them to find another firm that could meet those needs as well as you did? Most”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“When a company has problems, you have to move forward,”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“The most important thing is to understand that you are not a manager of strategy, or a functional specialist. Others can fill those roles. You are, first and foremost, a leader. Your goal is to build something that is not already there. To do so, you must confront the four basic questions you have already explored: What does my organization bring to the world? Does that difference matter? Is something about it scarce and difficult to imitate? Are we doing today what we need to do in order to matter tomorrow?”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“The purpose in the center says why you exist—what you do differently or better than others—and the unique configuration of activities and resources around the rim shows what will enable you to deliver on that promise.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“With all good intentions, we had backed strategy into a narrow corner and reduced it to a left-brain exercise. In doing so, we lost much of its vitality and much of its connection to the day-to-day life of a company, and we lost sight of what it takes to lead the effort.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“As a strategist, you need to live with “ungoverned chance.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Strategy—the system of value creation that underlies a company’s competitive position and uniqueness—has to be embraced as something open, not something closed. It is a system that evolves, moves, and changes.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“As you work to identify and define the purpose for your own company, don’t stop with your first idea, but like Taylor, refine and clarify. The more precisely you can express it, the better the anchor it will become for developing your strategy—and, quite possibly, the more new insights you will gain into your business.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“Being a strategist takes drive and initiative, and the willingness and curiosity to ask questions and venture forward.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs

“The intrinsic value of a well-developed system is perhaps easiest to see when a competitor tries to duplicate a successful firm. If you had the recipe, you could make Coca-Cola, for instance, but you wouldn’t be able to duplicate its brand recognition, its supply and distribution lines, or its pricing. These are resources and activities the firm has honed over decades; the fact that they work together in a tightly linked system makes them all that much more difficult to imitate.”
― Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs