Mastering the Rules of Competitive Strategy: A Resource Guide for Managers

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Managing Global Supply Chains: Compliance, Security, and Dealing with Terrorism. The result is a look into the minds of three tech pioneers who, to outside appearances, don't share much in common. Besides their contrasting personalities—Gates the pragmatic technocrat; Grove the disciplined engineer; and Jobs the visionary perfectionist—their companies had unique business models and filled very different niches in the technology value chain.

As they examined what the three CEOs had in common, however, Yoffie and Cusumano homed in on five key strategies that any manager, entrepreneur, or CEO can learn. Each of the lessons reads like a paradox or Zen koan that takes intelligence and practice to unpack. Bill Gates was able to envision a world in which there was a computer on every desk at a time when personal computers didn't exist.

But he also realized that the way to capitalize on that future was to focus his energies on controlling software, not hardware. Andy Grove foresaw the eventual break up of the vertically integrated computer industry, and was able to specialize in creating the core component of computing—the microprocessor.

Mastering the Rules of Competitive Strategy: A Resource Guide for Managers

And then he championed that silicon part with the famous "Intel Inside" marketing campaign. Steve Jobs saw a future in which consumers would move beyond the computer to use a range of electronic devices for entertainment and communication and then systematically rolled them out one step at a time—the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Gates was the first of the three to demonstrate another of Yoffie and Cusumano's lessons: Even more importantly, such platforms would allow creative developers outside your organization to add their unique value.

Grove faced a crucial decision regarding Intel's own platform when in the late s his engineers figured out a way to make a more efficient processor that nevertheless wouldn't be compatible with Intel's previous architecture.



After agonizing about the decision for a year, Grove chose to stick to the platform Intel had already developed, even if it meant jettisoning a potentially better product. Interestingly, Jobs stubbornly held out the longest in his vision of the product as supreme—pushing the proprietary Mac as the central hub of Apple's product line despite falling market share. In their book, Strategy Rules: Mangelsdorf spoke with Yoffie and Cusumano about what executives can learn from Gates, Grove, and Jobs about mastering the art of strategy.

What follows is an edited and condensed version of that conversation. There are several reasons for choosing these three. First and foremost, all three of the companies they led — Microsoft, Intel, and Apple — became the most valuable company in the world at some point. We were looking at three companies where we believed it was undisputed that the three individual CEOs had accomplished an extraordinary amount over their careers.

Second, we had spent a lot of time working with or observing all three of these individuals. We knew them, their records, and their companies extremely well. And by identifying three executives whose legacy as CEO was complete — and where the companies they led had continued to perform well after their departure — we could capture a more complete picture. We also understood the problems and occasional failures of these three CEOs, not just their successes. Get semi-monthly updates on how global companies are managing in a changing world.

When he took the next step in his career to help launch and build Intel, he was a true operating manager. He was running a division and then became chief operating officer. For example, Andy was an engineer who initially knew less than nothing about brands. He was selling an industrial product — semiconductors for computers and other electronic devices — to other industrial companies, and the concept of building a consumer brand was far beyond his experience.

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But he made a large personal effort to educate himself to understand what a consumer brand was and how consumer pull could work for an industrial products company like Intel. To continue on this question of developing as a strategist, we believe that Bill Gates was a natural strategist and was born to be a strategic thinker. But again, he, too, learned: He learned to expand his horizons. But when IBM came back to Gates, he clearly understood the opportunity that was ahead — to create the foundation for a whole new industry. What Gates really learned about is execution and organization.

He understood coding and algorithms, which allowed him to go one-on-one with engineers, but he went outside the company to hire talented managers with different backgrounds and experiences to run operations and various product groups. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, always had great product instincts, but he had to learn to master strategy in the high-tech world. The strategy of Apple initially was great products, one product at a time.

He only gradually adapted, with pressure from his management team in the s. After resisting for years, Jobs eventually agreed to adopt a broader platform strategy, with a vision of a digital hub that targeted Windows as well as Macintosh users. By the time iPods and iTunes starting rolling out to the broader market beyond Macintosh users, we think Jobs had become a brilliant strategist.

That involves learning from history, thinking about the problems the business had yesterday, and how to solve similar problems tomorrow.

Mastering Strategy

But great strategists are like great chess players or great game theorists: They need to think several steps ahead towards the end of the game and then reason back to what that means about what they need to do today. As a strategist, you need to think about where you want your business to be two, three, five, seven years down the road and then figure out what are the priorities and boundaries of what you need to do as a company today to get there.

You need to be able to anticipate customer needs — not just solving the customer problems of today, but what the customer is going to need tomorrow. Then match that to the capabilities you can deliver in terms of new products and new processes for the customer over the next several years.

You also need to anticipate what competitors will do and try to find ways to systematically build barriers to imitation and barriers to entry to reduce the likelihood that competitors will take away your advantage down the road. Finally, you have to be able to think about how whole industries may change.