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.
Past failures unlock future successes
When you're an investor, you can look at the quantitative and qualitative elements of an investment, but there's a third aspect: What you feel in your gut.
Success...is no longer a simple ascension of steps. You need to climb sideways and sometimes down, and sometimes you need to swing from the jungle gym and establish your own turf somewhere else on the playground.
The important thing is to keep playing, to play against weak opponents and to play for big stakes.
You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.
Man was designed for accomplishment, engineered for success, and endowed with the seeds of greatness.
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