If a strategy meets a goal: It's working. If a strategy meets a target: It's a success.
Michael PorterRead
Sound strategy starts with having the right goal
Interpretation
Effective planning begins with establishing clear objectives.
This quote by Michael Porter emphasizes the importance of setting the right goals as the foundation for any successful strategy. Without well-defined objectives, efforts can become misguided or ineffective, highlighting that clarity in what you want to achieve is crucial for the formulation of an effective plan of action.
In practice
In a business presentation when discussing strategic planning.
If a strategy meets a goal: It's working. If a strategy meets a target: It's a success.
Health care historically has been a very siloed field that's organized around medical specialties - urology, cardiac surgery, and so forth - and around the supply of these specialty services. The patient is the ping-pong ball that moves from service to service.
As a multisport athlete, I was always fascinated with competition and how to win. At HBS and later at the Harvard Department of Economics, I was drawn to the field of competition and strategy because it tackles perhaps the most basic question in both business management and industrial economics: What determines corporate performance?
In a period of economic downturn, the overwhelming instinct is to pare back, cut costs, and lay off. If you do that, do so with your strategy in mind. The worst mistake is to cut across the board. Instead, reconnect and recommit to a clear strategy that will distinguish yourself from others.
I think that, too many times, business has been seen as acting in its narrow self-interest rather than, essentially, contributing more broadly to society. I think a lot of that is unintentional; I don't think that many managers are deliberately trying to be unethical or are not trying to be sensitive to social needs.
If your goal is anything but profitability - if it's to be big, or to grow fast, or to become a technology leader - you'll hit problems.
I never had a plan. I have to say, I'm very shocked when people start a company and say, 'In five years I want to launch a perfume, or in 10 years I want to have this.' How can you know?
Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.
Shooting the ball is a part of the game. Everybody can shoot in their own way. Not everybody can make. But everybody can shoot.
I think the combination of graduate education in a field like Computer Science and the opportunity to apply this in a work environment like Microsoft is what drove me. The impact these opportunities create can lead to work that has broad, worldwide impact.
When I was publishing my first books, the previous generation of authors was fading away, so I was welcomed because I was a new author.
I also had a will that let me eliminate everything that stood in the way of my becoming the best dancer I could be. By a gradual process... (I) had invested every bit of my dreams, my hopes, my energies in defining myself as a dancer.
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