Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs

216 Pages·2015·2.01 MB·English

by  David B. Yoffie

DEDICATION
D
avid would like to dedicate this book to Andy Grove—mentor, critic,
friend, and leader who inspired me to never give up and always try
harder.
M
ichael would like to dedicate this book to both Xiaohua and Pico,
who keep me focused on the future.
CONTENTS
DEDICATION
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION The Making of a Master Strategist
CHAPTER 1 Look Forward, Reason Back
CHAPTER 2 Make Big Bets, Without Betting the Company
CHAPTER 3 Build Platforms and Ecosystems—Not Just Products
CHAPTER 4 Exploit Leverage and Power—Play Judo and Sumo
CHAPTER 5 Shape the Organization around Your Personal Anchor
CONCLUSION Lessons for the Next Generation
NOTES
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ALSO BY MICHAEL A. CUSUMANO AND DAVID B. YOFFIE
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
PREFACE
W
e have been teaching strategy at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology for almost thirty years. Over the past three decades, the field of
strategy has made enormous progress in delivering rigorous, analytical
frameworks, usually rooted in academic disciplines such as microeconomics,
game theory, and sociology. While we provide students with numerous tools, we
rarely talk about how great strategists think, learn, and put ideas together with
actions. There is a deep hole in our understanding about what makes a truly great
strategist. Academics frequently study companies and their leaders, but they
rarely study in depth the individuals themselves, along with the decisions that
define their careers and the organizations they build.
When we began this project, we made several important assumptions. One
was that managers and entrepreneurs could learn a great deal from Bill Gates,
Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs, despite their uniqueness and larger-than-life
personalities. There was never any question in our minds that these three
individuals were not your typical CEOs or entrepreneurs in terms of personal
abilities or achievements. They were titans of industry, to say the least. At the
same time, we concluded that their approaches could help managers and
entrepreneurs think more systematically about strategy, as well as execution,
because they tackled key problems in similar ways.
A second assumption was that, even though all three of our subjects were
from the world of high technology, their experience can give us great insight into
the role and importance of strategy and execution for many types of businesses.
One of the reasons we have spent so much of our careers studying high-tech
firms is that the pace of change puts an enormous premium on formulating the
right strategy at the right time, as well as attending to the details of execution. In
addition, quickly evolving technologies are becoming embedded in every
business today. Rapid changes in social media, cloud computing, mobile
devices, and even wearable technology will impact most firms over the next few
decades. Understanding how strategy develops in the high-tech world has
become part of everyday business life.
A third assumption is that strategy and execution are inextricably linked.
When we are teaching, students often ask, “What’s more important, strategy or
execution?” After a brief pause, we usually respond with another question:
“What would you rather have—a great strategy that is poorly executed or a bad
strategy that is executed perfectly?” The answer, of course, is neither. There is
no value in a great strategy that you can’t execute or great execution that leads
you in the wrong direction. Skillful CEOs must set the organization on the right
path and then lead their organizations to deliver results. As Bill Gates once said,
“A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is and lame
execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you will
go out of business.”1
Finally, we believe that becoming a great strategist is not innate. Most
successful executives learn over time how to think more strategically and how to
execute more effectively, at the tactical and organizational levels. We return to
this theme in the book’s concluding chapter. In the meantime, we will show that
Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs were not born as great strategists: Jobs
almost bankrupted the company during his first stint with Apple; Grove’s first
publication on how to run a business, High Output Management, was the
quintessential guide to being an operations-oriented middle manager; and
Gates’s knowledge of management and business strategy when he dropped out
of Harvard was hardly impressive. It was their ability to learn—about strategy,
execution, and new domains within their own businesses—that made them such
effective leaders over such long periods of time. We assume that other senior
managers and entrepreneurs, if they put their minds to it, can learn these skills as
well.
In many ways, the research on this book started in the mid-1980s, when we
began studying, writing about, or working in the software, computer, and
semiconductor industries. We have incorporated interviews conducted at the
three companies dating back to 1987. In total, we have relied on some one
hundred of our own interviews in different years, as well as on other books,
articles, and cases we and others have written. We also spent approximately a
year meeting a few times per month to compare ideas on our three subjects and
lay out the structure of the book before we started writing. The current
framework of five main “rules” and skill sets that we thought the three CEOs
shared emerged in the first few days of our discussions, reinforcing our belief
that Gates, Grove, and Jobs shared much in common with regard to how they
approached strategic challenges.
While we have already thanked many of the individuals who have helped us in
our research over the past two decades, we would like to express here our
appreciation to the executives who gave us their time and perspectives during the
fall of 2013, when we undertook the most current research. First and foremost,
we want to thank Andy Grove. Andy met with us several times between
September 2013 and July 2014. He read and commented on parts of the
manuscript, as well as answered numerous emails. Besides Grove, we
approached Bill Gates who, in late fall 2013, apologized for not being available.
Our interview strategy, with two exceptions, was to talk with executives who
had worked closely with Gates, Grove, and Jobs, but no longer worked for their
respective companies. We did not want to put anyone in an awkward position.
The exceptions were Renée James, who worked for five years as Grove’s
technical assistant and was Intel’s new president at the time of our meeting, and
Joel Podolny, Apple’s head of human resources, who worked with David at
Harvard Business School before going to Yale and then Apple. In addition to
meeting with Grove, James, and Podolny, we did twelve additional interviews in
the fall of 2013: we wish to thank Fred Anderson, Dennis Carter, Tom Dunlap,
Carl Everett, Pat Gelsinger, Frank Gill, Ron Johnson, Paul Maritz, Jon
Rubinstein, Russ Siegelman, Avie Tevanian, and Les Vadasz.
We have also benefited greatly from numerous readers of the manuscript and
others who provided written feedback on our seminars. These include our agent,
James Levine; the publisher, Hollis Heimbouch; and Juan Alcacer, Deborah
Ancona, Ankur Chavda, Scott Cook, Donna Dubinsky, Kathy Eisenhardt,
Andreas Goeldi, Mel Horwitch, Reed Hundt, Renée James, Carol Kauffman,
Karim Lakhani, Doug Melamed, Sanjiv Mirchandani, Tim Ott, Joel Podolny,
Alec Ramsay, Steven Sinofsky, Brad Smith, Michael Scott-Morton, Ben Slivka,
Richard Tedlow, and Eric Van den Stein. We also thank participants in seminars
at Stanford Engineering’s Department of Management Science and Engineering,
London Business School, Imperial College Business School, Oxford’s Saïd
Business School, the Harvard Business School Strategy Conference and HBS
Strategy Seminar, and the MIT Sloan Seminar in Technological Innovation,
Entrepreneurship, and Strategy.
A few individuals were indispensable: Eric Baldwin was David’s research
associate, who dug into every aspect of the research, looking for new examples,
insights, references, and perspectives to help us with every chapter in the book.
We are deeply indebted to our editor, Mary Kwak, who pushed us to clarify our
thinking, and played a crucial role in making the book more readable for a
broader audience. David’s assistant, Cathyjean Gustafson, was incredibly
supportive at every stage of the process.
Of course, our wives, Terry Yoffie and Xiaohua Yang, read multiple drafts
of the manuscript and were our biggest critics, our finest guides, and our biggest
cheerleaders.

INTRODUCTION
The Making of a Master Strategist
I
n early March 1998, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs, the CEOs of
Microsoft, Intel, and Apple, posed together at a party in New York City
celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Time magazine. This had never
happened before and would never happen again. The resulting photograph is the
only one ever taken of the three together when they were all running their
respective companies. Most astonishing were the tuxedos! For one night, Jobs
had shed his black mock turtleneck and jeans, Grove his leather jacket, and
Gates his habitual sweater and slacks.
In the center of the picture, Grove is beaming. Only weeks earlier, Time had
named him Man of the Year, the crowning achievement of an illustrious career.
Intel was enjoying the best results in its history, dominating the microprocessor
business and leading the world in semiconductor revenues and profits. At the top
of his game, Grove had just announced that he was retiring as CEO and stepping
up to chairman, a position he held until 2005.
On the right, Gates has a more circumspect smile. As head of Microsoft, he
had crushed every obstacle in his path, including Intel’s foray into software,
Apple’s challenge to the desktop PC, and, most recently, Netscape’s effort to
leverage the Internet and unseat Microsoft as the world’s most powerful
software company. But Gates’s success had brought unwelcome attention. Just
two months later, the U.S. Department of Justice, plus twenty states and the
District of Columbia, would file a battery of lawsuits charging that Microsoft
illegally used its market power to thwart competition. In 2000, Gates would end
his twenty-five-year run as CEO. He remained as chairman of the board until
2014, when he again stepped aside to become an advisor to new CEO Satya
Nadella.
On the left, Jobs displays his trademark smirk, looking as usual like the only