Doug Skinner

“Six Strategy Traps

1) The do-it-all strategy: failing to make choices, and making everything a priority. Remember, strategy is choice.

2) The Don Quixote strategy: attacking competitive "walled cities" or taking on the strongest competitor first, head-to-head. Remember, where to play is your choice. Pick somewhere you can have a choice to win.

3) The Waterloo Strategy: starting wars on multiple fronts with multiple competitors at the same time. No company can do everything well. If you try to do so, you will do everything weakly.

4) The something-for-everyone strategy: attempting to capture all consumer or channel or geographic or category segments at once. Remember, to create value, you have to choose to serve some constituents really well and not worry about the others.

5) The dreams-that-never-come-true strategy: developing high-level aspirations and mission statements that never get translated into concrete where-to-play and how-to-win choices, core capabilities, and management systems. Remember that aspirations are not strategy. Strategy is the answer to all five questions in the choice cascade.

6) The program-of-the-month strategy: settling for generic industry strategies, in which all competitors are chasing the same customers, geographies, and segments in the same way. The choice cascade and activity system that supports these choices should be distinctive. The more your choices look like those of your competitors, the less likely you will ever win.”
― A.G. Lafley, Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

“Words and pictures are yin and yang. Married, they produce a progeny more interesting than either parent.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Thierry sums up the belief this way: “It’s important to understand what you don’t know yet and what you need to know. The creation comes from imagining what is missing. You need to dream things before you can create things that don’t exist.”
― Frank Slootman, Rise of the Data Cloud

“With great power comes great responsibility.”
― Stan Lee