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.

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.

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.

The proposition that growth itself creates value is so deeply entrenched in the rhetoric of business that it has become an article of almost unquestioned faith that growth is a good thing.

But unless you can buy companies for less than they are worth, or unless you are specially positioned to add more value to the target than anyone else can, no value is created by such expansion.