Strategy & Management
From
If you can read the Chinese below. Then do you think it is describing the strategy of climbing mountain or it is a way of hiking?
"山不轉路轉，路不轉人轉，人不轉心轉。"
I Ching 《易經》 is the Chinese wisdom of change.
"With every new wave of optimism or pessimism, we are ready to abandon history and time-tested principles, but cling tenaciously and unquestioningly to our prejudices."
" ... the kind of securities to be purchased and the rate of return to be sought depend not on the investor's financial resources but on his financial equipment in terms of knowledge, experience and temperament."
"The whole structure of stock-market quotations contains a built-in contradiction. The better a company's record and prospects, the less relationship the price of its shares will have to their book value. "
"Basically, price fluctuations have only one significant meaning for the true investor. They provide him with an opportunity to buy wisely when prices fall sharply and to sell wisely when they advance a great deal. At other times he will do better if he forgets about the stock market and pays attention to his dividend returns and to the operating results of his companies."
"The speculator's primary interest lies in anticipating and profiting from market fluctuations. The investor's primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices."
"The more it changes, the more it's the same thing."
"However, the risk of paying too high a price for good-quality stocks - while a real one - is not the chief hazard confronting the average buyer of securities. Observation over many years has taught us that the chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of favorable business conditions. The purchasers view the current good earnings as equivalent to "earning power" and assume that prosperity is synonymous with safety. "
"The more seriously investors take the per-share earnings figures as published, the more necessary it is for them to be on their guard against accounting factor of one kind and another that may impair the ture comparability of the numbers. We have mentioned three sorts of these factors: the use of special charges, which may never be reflected in the per-share earnings, the reduction in the normal income-tax deduction by reason of past losses, and the dillution factor implicit in the existence of substantial amounts of convertible securities or warrants. A fourth item that has had a significant effect on reported earnings in the past is the method of treating depreciation - chiefly as between the "straight-line" and the "accelerated" schedules. ... Still another factor, important at times, is the choice between charging off research and development costs in the year they are incurred or amortizing them over a period of years. Finally let us mention the choice between the FIFO (first-in-first-out) and LIFO (last-in-first-out) methods of valuing inventories."
"Investment is most intelligent when it is most businesslike."
"The essence of strategy is to perform the activities involved in competing in the business differently from rivals. ... Strategies without significant differences in activities are rarely sustainable."
"Strategy, then, requires real innovation. ... Incremental improvement along an established path is insufficient for strategy."
"Strategy is not only about choosing a unique position and tailoring activities but also about making trade-offs in how a company delivers value to its customers. .... [Trade-offs] therefore limit the likelihood and ease of imitation. ... Without trade-offs, competition degenerates to mutually destructive battles on the same dimensions of value, and success rests wholly on operational effectiveness."
"... strategy requires constant discipline and clear communication. Indeed, one of the most important functions of an explicit, communicated strategy is to guide employees in making the right choices when trade-offs arise in the course of their individual day-to-day activities."
"Excluding one group of customers to serve another, for instance, places a real or imagined limit on revenue. ... Managers are constantly tempted to take incremental steps that will relax these limits but blur a company's strategic position."
"They [managers] succumb to the temptation to chase 'easy' growth by adding popular features and taking on product lines or services that do not fit their strategy. Or they target new customers or market segments in which the company offers nothing unique. Worse yet, they start imitating competitors' popular products or services, matching their production processes and even making parallel acquistions."
"Compromises and inconsistencies required to pursue market share and growth run a grave risk of eroding whatever competitive advantages a company originally had. Attempting to compete in several ways at once creates confusion and undermines organizational motivation and focus. Profits fall, so more revenue is seen as the answer. With managers unable or unwilling to make choices, the company embarks on a new round of broadening and compromises. Often rivals continue to match one another's moves until desperation breaks the cycle. In the west, this means merging or downsizing."
"The rapid diffusion of best practices throughout the world has made the pursuit of operational effectiveness a given. However, superior performance cannot be achieved through operational effectiveness alone. Strategy is what sets high-performers apart from low performers. Distinctive strategies are also much harder to imitate."
"Competing on strategy has another important benefit. A more positive-sum form of competition is created in which customers gain real choices, rivals become superior in serving their chosen segments, and the overall market can expand. Industry structure often improves in the process."
"The logic, analysis, and personality necessary for attaching meaning to information to yield attention is one of the most powerful tools in personal, as well as corporate, management. It is what makes leaders great."
"The meaning is communicated through the organization - via stories, incentives, and organizational designs - in such a way that the employees have no doubts that certain things matter more than others. This is how a corporate culture is born. And when the culture bursts through the organizational membrane to reach the external world, the customers know what the company stands for and how they are likely to be treated. But it all starts with the leader."
Attention-oriented view of strategy:
"Some strategy and strategic decision-making processes formulate and communicate strategy at the same time,while engaging the attention of particpants at a high level throughout. This is the appeal, for example, of scenarios, simulations, war games, and other strategic exercises."
"Scenarios, simulations, and other types of models commonly used in strategic planning are attention-focusing devices. They cannot model all factors in the strategic environment, but only a few. As a result, they focus the participants' attention on some important factors as predictors or determinants of a company's function, and encourage them to ignore others. Attention-oriented managers should make sure to inquire whether the factors treated in such models are truly the most worthy of their attention."