Looking just at the actions of a winning firm, you see only part of the picture. Whenever an organization succeeds greatly, there is also, at the same time, either blocked or failed competition.

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.

Here, as in so many situations, the required actions were not mysterious. The impediment was the hope that the pain of those actions could, somehow, be avoided. Indeed, we always hope that a brilliant insight or very clever design will allow us to accomplish several apparently conflicting objectives with a single stroke, and occasionally we are vouchsafed this kind of deliverance.

In creating strategy, it is often important to take on the viewpoints of others, seeing how the situation looks to a rival or to a customer. Advice to do this is both often given and taken. Yet this advice skips over what is possibly the most useful shift in viewpoint: thinking about your own thinking.

I am reminded that good strategies are usually “corner solutions.” That is, they emphasize focus over compromise. They focus on one aspect of the situation, not trying to be all things to all people.