If a strategy meets a goal: It's working. If a strategy meets a target: It's a success.
Interpretation
A strategy is effective if it achieves its intended goals or targets.
Michael Porter highlights the importance of evaluating strategies based on their outcomes. Achieving a goal means the strategy is functioning as intended, while hitting a specific target signifies success, suggesting that both concepts are critical in measuring the effectiveness of a strategy.
In practice
During a team meeting discussing our quarterly objectives, we can use this quote to emphasize the need for measurable strategies.
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.
You can't have a healthy society unless you have healthy companies that are making a profit, that are employing people and that are growing.
I know how gratifying it is not only to work in film but to be acknowledged by peers; producing 9 to 5 was an opportunity that I valued precisely because itβs so rarely in the hands of women.
Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you're exactly the same.
Celebrate your success and stand strong when adversity hits, for when the storm clouds come in, the eagles soar while the small birds take cover.
I want to be successful, not famous.
By the time a player becomes a Grandmaster, almost all of his training time is dedicated to work on this first phase. The opening is the only phase that holds out the potential for true creativity and doing something entirely new.
A crown Golden in show, is but a wreath of thorns, Bring dangers, troubles, cares, and sleepless nights To him who wears the regal diadem
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