... strategy, responsive to innovation and ambition, selects the path, identifying how, why, and where leadership and determination are to be applied.

Unless leadership offers a theory of why things haven’t worked in the past, or why the challenge is difficult, it is hard to generate good strategy.

A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.

In business, most deep strategic changes are brought about by a change in diagnosis—a change in the definition of the company’s situation.

A strategy coordinates action to address a specific challenge.