Any coherent strategy pushes resources toward some ends and away from others. These are the inevitable consequences of scarcity and change. Yet this channeling of resources away from traditional uses is fraught with pain and difficulty.

In many large organizations, the challenge is often diagnosed as internal. That is, the organization’s competitive problems may be much lighter than the obstacles imposed by its own outdated routines, bureaucracy, pools of entrenched interests, lack of cooperation across units, and plain-old bad management. Thus, the guiding policy lies in the realm of reorganization and renewal. And the set of coherent actions are changes in people, power, and procedures. In other cases the challenge may be building or deepening competitive advantage by pushing the frontiers of organizational capability.

Thus, we should seek coordinated policies only when the gains are very large. There will be costs to demanding coordination, because it will ride roughshod over economies of specialization and more nuanced local responses. The brilliance of good organization is not in making sure that everything is connected to everything else. Down that road lies a frozen

maladaptive stasis. Good strategy and good organization lie in specializing on the right activities and imposing only the essential amount of coordination.

... a strong resource position can obviate the need for sophisticated design-type strategy. If, instead, there is only a moderate resource position—perhaps a new product idea or a customer relationship—the challenge is to build a sensible and coherent strategy around that resource. Finally, the cleverest strategies, the ones we study down through the years, begin with very few strategic resources, obtaining their results through the adroit coordination of actions in time and across functions.

”If the business is really successful, then there is usually a good strategic logic behind that success, be it hidden or not. But the truth is that many companies, especially large complex companies, don’t really have strategies. At the core, strategy is about focus, and most complex organizations don’t focus their resources. Instead, they pursue multiple goals at once, not concentrating enough resources to achieve a breakthrough in any of them.