I have always believed a successful company must have a customer/marketplace orientation and a strong marketing organization. That’s why my second step in creating a global enterprise had to be to fix and focus IBM’s marketing efforts.

... good strategies start with massive amounts of quantitative analysis—hard, difficult analysis that is blended with wisdom, insight, and risk taking.

If a management team doesn’t believe that it has identified and is seriously funding new growth opportunities, then it is likely to wander off and drink the heady brew of acquisitions and diversification—and ultimately fail.

Thus, it is very hard to develop a unique strategy, and even harder, should you develop one, to keep it proprietary.

But good strategy looks past these issues to what is fundamental. From that perspective, the threats to the company are not specific new products or competitive moves, but changes that undermine the logic of its design.