If a strategy meets a goal: It's working. If a strategy meets a target: It's a success.
Interpretation
A strategy is effective if it achieves its intended goals or targets.
Michael Porter highlights the importance of evaluating strategies based on their outcomes. Achieving a goal means the strategy is functioning as intended, while hitting a specific target signifies success, suggesting that both concepts are critical in measuring the effectiveness of a strategy.
In practice
During a team meeting discussing our quarterly objectives, we can use this quote to emphasize the need for measurable strategies.
Health care historically has been a very siloed field that's organized around medical specialties - urology, cardiac surgery, and so forth - and around the supply of these specialty services. The patient is the ping-pong ball that moves from service to service.
As a multisport athlete, I was always fascinated with competition and how to win. At HBS and later at the Harvard Department of Economics, I was drawn to the field of competition and strategy because it tackles perhaps the most basic question in both business management and industrial economics: What determines corporate performance?
In a period of economic downturn, the overwhelming instinct is to pare back, cut costs, and lay off. If you do that, do so with your strategy in mind. The worst mistake is to cut across the board. Instead, reconnect and recommit to a clear strategy that will distinguish yourself from others.
I think that, too many times, business has been seen as acting in its narrow self-interest rather than, essentially, contributing more broadly to society. I think a lot of that is unintentional; I don't think that many managers are deliberately trying to be unethical or are not trying to be sensitive to social needs.
If your goal is anything but profitability - if it's to be big, or to grow fast, or to become a technology leader - you'll hit problems.
You can't have a healthy society unless you have healthy companies that are making a profit, that are employing people and that are growing.
The world was not supportive. They look at me as a joke for 13 to 14 years until I could prove feasibility; then I had competitors. Those that laughed at me became my competitors.
A successful competition for me is always going out there and putting 100 percent into whatever I'm doing. It's not always winning. People, I think, mistake that it's just winning. Sometimes it could be, but for me, it's hitting the best sets I can, gaining confidence, and having a good time and having fun.
Focus is scary—until you realize that it only means turning your back on markets you could never have anyway. Sharp focus on jobs that customers are trying to get done holds the promise of greatly improving the odds of success in new-product development.
For me right now I think being the world number one is a bigger deal than being the world champion because I think it shows better who plays the best chess. That sounds self-serving but I think it's also right.
There is no greater glory that can befall a man that what he achieves with the speed of his feet or the strength of his hands.
No one can guarantee you a job other than satisfied customers. That's the only thing that works. Nothing creates work other than products and services you provide that create satisfied customers.
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