vii Kenichi Ohmae has been described as "Mr. Strategy" in his native
Japan, where he is chairman of the Japan office of McKinsey & Company, the international consulting firm... His
special interest and area of expertise is formulating creative strategies and developing organizational concepts to implement
them.
p.2 How do they [Japanese companies] do it [are outstanding
performers in the marketplace]? The answer is easy. They may not have a strategic planning staff, but they do have
a strategist of great natural talent; usually the founder or chief executive... they have an intuitive grasp of the basic
elements of strategy. They have an idiosyncratic mode of thinking in which company, customers, and competition merge
in a dynamic interaction out of which a comprehensive set of objectives and plans for action eventually crystallizes.
Insight is the key to this process... It is the creative element in these plans
and the drive and will of the mind that conceived them that give these strategies their extraordinary competitive impact.
p.3 Today's giant institutions, both public and private, are by and large not organized for innovation.
Their systems and processes are all oriented toward incremental improvement - doing better what they are doing already.
p.5 although there is no secret formula for inventing a successful strategy, there are some specific
concepts and approaches that can help anyone develop the kind of mentality that comes up with superior strategic ideas.
p.13 In business as on the battlefield, the object of strategy is to bring about the conditions
most favorable to one's own side, judging precisely the right moment to attack or withdraw and always assessing the
limits of compromise correctly. Besides the habit of analysis, what marks the mind of the strategist is an intellectual
elasticity or flexibility that enables him to come up with realistic responses to changing situations, not simply
to discriminate with great precision among different shades of gray.
p.13 In strategic thinking, one first seeks a clear understanding of the particular character of
each element of a situation and then makes the fullest possible use of human brainpower to restructure the elements in the
most advantageous way.
p.13-15 No matter how difficult or unprecedented the problem, a breakthrough to the best possible
solution can come only from a combination of rational analysis, based on the real nature of things, and imaginative reintegration
of all the different items into a new pattern, using nonlinear brainpower. This is always the most effective approach
to devising strategies for dealing successfully with challenges and opportunities
p.15 The first stage in strategic thinking is to pinpoint the critical issue in the situation.
p.17 Solution-oriented questions can be formulated only if the critical issue is localized and grasped
accurately in the first place... When problems are poorly defined or vaguely comprehended, one's creative mind does
not work sharply... For this reason, isolating the crucial points of the problem - in other words, determining the
critical issue - is most important to the discovery of a solution.
p.36 What business strategy is all about - what distinguishes it from all other kinds of business
planning - is, in a word, competitive advantage. Without competitors there would be no need for strategy, for the
sole purpose of strategic planning is to enable the company to gain, as efficiently as possible, a sustainable edge over its
competitors.
p.42 If you can identify the areas which really hold the key to success in your industry and apply the right
mix of resources to them, you may be able to put yourself into a position of real competitive superiority.
p.48 Attempting to achieve decisive superiority all along the line would overstrain any pool of management
resources, however large. Fortunately, control of one or two key stages will usually suffice to establish a position of competitive
advantage.
p.60-61 the best way to break out of a situation that has become excessively rigid over a long period of
time is to shake things up a bit by listing the most basic assumptions of the industry or trade one by one and asking
whether they still hold or at least whether they are still vital to the continued existence of the business... The
basis of such an approach is always to confront what is taken for granted in an industry or business with the simple
question, Why? ... one demands the reason for that and persists in asking "Why?" four or five times in succession,
one will certainly get to the guts of the issue, where fundamental bottlenecks and problems lie. All the great inventions
of the past had their origin in this kind of inquisitive mind.
p.69-70 Hostile competitive moves can come at us from at least three different directions, and we
should therefore have our defenses ready for all three of them... The choice of three strategic axes amounts to a message
from the general staff to the battlefield commander: "If our defenses are sound on these three sides, battles can be fought
and won."
Along each axis of strategic freedom, a series of points can typically be located, corresponding
to the principal moves that companies engaging in this business can take in the attempt to secure competitive advantage.
p.83 In any business situation, a handful of the myriad factors present will basically determine
the outcome, and strategy will be successful if these factors can be controlled or applied skillfully. We have called
these the key factors for success.
p.84 A strategic thinker never allows himself to lose sight of the key factors in the business
or operation for which he is responsible. With that constant awareness, he will shape his strategy - a strategy not
for total war on all fronts but for a limited war on the fronts defined by the key factors for success. It is the
perfectionist pursuit of these key factors - nothing more or less - that brings in the profits. In other words, it
is this focus on key factors that gives the major direction or orientation to the operation we call strategic thinking.
p.84 By first identifying the probable key factors for success and then screening them by proof or disproof,
it is often possible for the strategist to penetrate very quickly to the core of a problem.
p.86-87 If the strategic thinker can generate an awareness of what ideal state of affairs might
be, even if it seems unattainable at present, constraints that have loomed as absolute can
be seen rather differently - as potentially surmountable obstacles to the attainment of the ideal solution.
Strategic thinking can then be concentrated on ways of removing these obstacles... by directly challenging the constraints,
the strategic thinker usually finds that in reality they are far less formidable then they had appeared.
p.97 When no competition exists, there is no need to strategize
p.225 Actually, in my opinion, many Western corporations already suffer from too much strategic planning.
