Competing for the Future

"As a benchmark, our experience suggests that to develop a prescient and distinctive point of view about the future, a senior management team must be willing to spend about 20 to 50% of its time, over a period of several months."

"A view of strategy that recognizes that a firm must "unlearn" much of its past before it can find the future."

"Top management must be just as obsessed with maximizing opportunity share as with maximizing market share."

"Creating the future often requires that a company build new core competencies, competencies that typically transcend a single business unit."

"Few companies can create the future single-handedly; most need a helping hand."

"Perseverance may be just as important as speed in the battle for the future."

"Whole industries become vulnerable to new rules when all the incumbents accept, more or less, the same industry conventions."

"Any company that wants to avoid a genuine profit crisis must create a quasi-crisis years in advance."

"Although managers often point out to us just how different their industry is today from a decade ago, few seem to be alert to the possibility that their industry may be as different a decade hence."

"Markets mature, but competencies evolve."

"Companies that create the future do more than satisfy customers, they constantly amaze them."

"A strategic architecture is the essential link between today and tomorrow, between short term and longer."

"In competing for the future, a key goal is to maximize the ratio of learning over investment."

"One doesn't achieve resource leverage by going around in circles."

"Whereas getting to the future first brings substantial rewards, it can, of course, carry significant risks."

"Every company hopes to punch more than its weight and cast a shadow bigger than its actual size."

"Although many companies have a wide variety of partnerships, the individual partnerships are often disconnected, each serving an independent and unrelated purpose."

"Few companies understand how to leverage existing core competencies beyond the boundaries of current business units to create new competitive space."

"Every company should ask itself where the opportunities are to broaden the deployment of existing competencies to strengthen position in existing markets."

"Getting to the future first, and being first up on the scoreboard, requires that a company learn faster than its rivals about the precise dimensions of customer demand and required product performance."

"The imperative of global preemption is no excuse for a hasty global launch of an ill-conceived and undertested product or service."

"Understanding industry structure is not the same thing as reshaping it."