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To run your company successfully, you need to develop a business strategy that will work. But the techniques used by business advisors and business strategists are ones that many company executives have little need for in their day-to-day roles. If you want to know what it takes to develop a strategy that will bring you success and how you can design the right strategy for your business, read on.
In this article, I'll show you how to develop a business strategy that will work for you, including:
Mastering these strategy skills is the first step in learning how to run a successful small business.
What is business strategy?
The word ‘strategy’ is over-used and often misunderstood. Partly as a result, strategy is often designed poorly, or simply not created at all.
So let’s start with a definition. It doesn’t matter exactly what words you use as long as you capture the essence. Here’s my version:
A strategy is a set of analyses and plans that a company puts in place in order to reach a goal
Putting it the other way around: goals are where you want to go, strategy is how you plan to get there.
Here’s another definition from Max McKeown, one of today’s foremost writers on strategy: ‘Strategy is about how you attain desirable ends with available means.‘ [1]
Let me give you a practical example. Let’s say a company aims to double its turnover in the next five years – this would be a goal.
To reach that goal, the company might plan to boost its brand image by launching a new range of higher performance products. It could aim to increase its market share with its existing customers by offering volume-based discounts to its largest clients. Finally, it may enter a new customer segment by launching indirect sales through distributors. These would be three examples of strategies that are directed at the goal of doubling turnover.
(I’m using the word ‘product’ in this article to cover both products and services, for the sake of simplicity).
Good CEOs are not automatically great business strategists
Would you set out on a journey that you’ve never taken before without picking up a map of how to reach the place you want to get to? No, you wouldn’t. Yet some company bosses run their businesses without a rigorously thought-out strategy that can guide them to their destination.
That’s not as odd as it seems. CEOs can’t be experts in everything. They're usually experts in the product their company sells — that’s pretty essential. But just as top football players don’t always turn out to be top football managers, a CEO who is a product expert may not necessarily be a great business strategist as well.
There’s no doubt that a company needs to take advantage of the CEO’s product expertise if it is going to develop strategies that work. But designing strategy requires a range of other skills and attitudes that many CEOs don’t need to call on in their day-to-day role.
That’s why some good business ideas fail — for lack of the right strategy. Sometimes entrepreneurs work incredibly hard to build their business but can’t get traction and struggle to work out why. They often put it down to insufficient marketing spend or ineffective sales staff. In fact, the company may just be working hard at the wrong things.
If you feel your business is not performing to its full potential, but you can’t put your finger on why, it might be time to carry out a business strategy review. Trying to build your business without the right strategy can be like trying to drive a car with the handbrake on. A good business strategist or business advisor can help you release the handbrake and start moving through the gears.
Designing great strategy is based on leveraging your competitive advantages (aka competitive strengths, or capabilities)
Successful businesses tend to have particular strengths, or capabilities, that their competitors don’t have. These capabilities enable them to serve customers in ways that those customers find valuable and will pay for. At its simplest, good small business strategy is about equipping your company with unique capabilities that you can use to create value for your customers.
Let’s make that more specific, with some help from Michael Porter. Dr Porter is one of the fathers of modern thinking on business strategy. In his theory of competitive advantage[2], Porter identified two generic ways that companies can compete successfully:
Differentiation. This means offering your customers a product that is superior to what your competitors offer. Your product doesn’t have to be superior in every way. It just needs to have an element of difference that is important for at least some customers. Perhaps you have a distinctive brand or your product has special features. Most small businesses compete based on some form of differentiation.
Lowest cost (or ‘cost leadership’). This means you can produce your product more cheaply than your competitors. Perhaps you are bigger than they are and you can spread your fixed costs across a larger volume of sales. Or you might serve a particular market niche where customers only need a simpler, stripped down product. Competing on lowest cost is common among large companies, but some small companies are successful with lowest cost strategies too.
Companies that successfully differentiate should be able to sell their products for a premium price compared with standard products. Companies following a lowest cost approach should be able to sell their products for the same price as their competitors, but at lower cost. Either way, both sets of companies should be more profitable than the average for their industry. Both may also use their advantages to grow faster than their competitors (i.e., to gain market share).
How you can develop business strategies that lead to success for your company
Now that we’ve covered the theory, it’s time to ask: how should you use the theory to create strategies for your business that will lead to strong and sustainable profit growth?
First, you must identify your unique strengths
Consider carefully what it is about your company that your clients value. Why do they buy from you? What is the value that you bring to their business? How do your products help them to be successful? Do you have the right product-market fit?
The answers may not be the obvious ones. For example, nobody buys a Rolex watch to find out what time it is. They buy one to reward themselves for their hard-earned success and – perhaps – to signal their financial status to other people. So for Rolex, the luxury appearance of their watches and the way they position the brand using advertising are likely to be critical success factors. Whether the watches keep accurate time is likely to be less crucial (although hopefully they do that too).
Looking at your business, perhaps you sell a relatively standard product, but you have perfect systems in place to deliver fault-free products on time and this is critical for your customers. In this case, your customers aren’t exactly buying a product. They are paying to be sure that their own business will not face costly delays because of a missing component. Your brand provides them with a kind of insurance that they don’t get from your competitors.
Let’s take another example. Perhaps you sell a service and you have developed a way to customise it in complex ways that are difficult to do cost-efficiently. As a result, your competitors are less flexible in how they service clients. In this case, your customers are paying for convenience. You are making their life easier and enabling them to focus on their core activity in ways that your competitors don’t.
Here are some questions that could help you think about what makes your business unique:
How do your customers use your product in their business? How does your product help them serve their customers better?
What particular skills does your company have? For a moment, stop thinking of your company as a business that ‘makes X’ or ‘sells Y’. Try instead to think of your staff as skilled problem solvers. What customer problems do they solve?
Think about all the touch points between your company and its customers. Even if they seem mundane (e.g., accepting orders or delivering physical goods), think about how these interactions may contribute to the customer’s perception of you as a supplier.
What do your customers tell you about your competitors and how you differ from them?
How a business advisor can help you: Thinking about your unique strengths is hard, because to you they may seem like normal daily business. You may just think of them as what makes your business tick. An advisor who is a good business strategist can help you identify which of your capabilities constitute competitive advantages.
Now it’s time to start designing the best small business strategy for your company
Now that you have identified the key strengths of your business and the value you bring to your customers, it’s time to start building your strategy. This is when you work out how to convert your strengths into a business that is as profitable and fast-growing as it can be.
You may conclude that your best option is to keep doing what you have done up to now and just do it in a different way that leads to faster growth or higher profitability. That would already be a good result.
But bear in mind that the purpose of the exercise is to create the best business you can out of the strengths you have now and the ones you could build in the future. If that means doing something quite different in the future to what you have done in the past, you should be open to this.
To kick off, ask yourself lots of open questions:
Why do we serve the customers that we serve? Are there other customers who would value our products more? Who would be willing to pay more for them? Who would be cheaper or easier for us to supply?
Why do we make our products this way? Could we speed up production and delivery? Could we simplify a product to make it less costly or more reliable? Could we add features that would make it more costly, but much more valuable?
Why do we carry out some functions ourselves and outsource others? If we manufacture our own products, does this give us an edge in how we design and market them? If not, would it be cheaper or quicker to get someone else to make them for us? Alternatively, should we bring some things in house that we currently outsource?
What have been the biggest changes in our industry over the last 12 months? What will be the biggest changes in the next three or five years? What could we do to take advantage of those changes?
Do we take a lot of risks, or not very many? With our current approach, is it likely we will generate any major performance breakthroughs? If not, should we take more risks?
How a business advisor can help you: It’s hard to break out of the habits of thinking and working that you may have followed for many years. An advisor who is also a good business strategist can help you step outside your day-to-day role and look at your company with fresh eyes.
Tried and tested approaches exist that could help you generate good strategy ideas
One common technique for getting a strategy group (e.g., the executive management team) to open their minds and generate new ideas is SWOT analysis. It’s simple enough that almost anyone can engage with it, even if they have no experience of developing strategy. That makes it a great tool for involving people outside the management team (design, production, sales etc) – and that’s definitely something you should do.
The group starts by listing all of the company’s existing Strengths, followed by all of its Weaknesses. Then they list all of the Opportunities they see for the business in the future, most of which usually come from outside the company. Finally, they list all of the upcoming Threats they can think of – actual and potential.
This process works as an excellent ice breaker, encouraging everyone in the group to pitch in. And it gets people’s minds in the right zone. It encourages them to think about big picture issues and it makes them consider both external as well as internal factors.
The group should then come up with as many ideas as it can for how to build on the Strengths and Opportunities and eliminate the Weaknesses and Threats. Participants should just shout out any and every idea that springs to mind, without trying to filter for quality. The aim is to generate a long list of possible initiatives.
In the final stage, the group should work through this long list and narrow it down to a shorter list of the best ideas that could be developed into strategy initiatives. It is only during this refinement process that weaker ideas should be struck out. If the group uses its collective experience and insight effectively, ideas that initially seem weak can sometimes be developed into stronger ones that are worth taking forward.
Another good technique for generating fresh insight into your business is ‘segmentation’. To segment means to divide a group up into smaller sub-groups, based on important characteristics that are shared by some of the group but not by others.
The most common example is customer segmentation. Discovering ways in which you could segment your customer base into several smaller groups can reveal opportunities to more effectively match what you produce with what (some) customers want.
Here are some questions you could ask to get started:
Do all your customers use your products in the same way? Do they all value your products for the same reasons? Could you adjust your product range to more effectively meet the needs of some customers (which could prompt them to buy more)? Could you introduce a premium product that some customers would pay more for?
Are some customers more profitable for you than others, in one way or another? For example, do some customers place just a few orders but with a high value, while others place lots of tiny orders? Could you adjust the way you do business to take advantage of that?
A third method you can use to generate strategy ideas is to think about your customers’ unmet needs and pain points. Do your customers tell you they have problems they can’t seem to fix? Your customers’ problems can be your opportunities, if you can find solutions that make use of the unique strengths that you have identified in your business. If some of your customers have a particular problem, could you solve it more cheaply or more effectively than your competitors? If so, you may have hit on a lucrative new opportunity.
How a business advisor can help you: Some tools for generating strategy ideas are simple, like SWOT. But it can still help to use a moderator to create a collaborative, non-judgmental mindset among participants and get the ball rolling with suggestions. With more complex techniques like market segmentation, an advisor who is experienced in applying the concepts may be able to guide you through the process more efficiently than you would do on your own. An advisor who is a good business marketing strategist can be a particular help with customer-focused strategy exercises.
Your strategy analyses and initiatives should reinforce each other, not pull in opposite directions
As you think about creating new strategy for your business, bear in mind that a strategy review should also be an opportunity to do some housekeeping.
Over time, the different parts of a business tend to go their own way. They optimise the way they operate to suit themselves. For example, production departments usually prefer to make standard products in long runs, because it’s cheaper and easier for them. In contrast, many salespeople like to find out exactly what their customers want and then pressure production to customise it for them — because it’s an easier sell and makes their customers happy.
Only one of these approaches will be best for a business and which one will depend on its unique circumstances. But the best approach is not always the one that prevails. If there is a debate, it’s often the department with the most political clout within an organisation that wins the day — not the one with the best arguments.
This tendency is compounded by the way that companies incentivise their staff — with individual and team performance bonuses. As a consequence, teams and individuals behave in the way that boosts their own performance statistics. And who can blame them? It’s what they are being incentivised to do. But there is an old rule – very widely ignored – that optimising each individual part of a system does not optimise the system as a whole.
So as you think of new ways of doing things, make sure that the strategies you are following across your company consistently play to the competitive strengths you have identified in your business. The way your teams work should always seek to take best advantage of those strengths.
For example, if your company’s reputation with customers depends on them paying a premium price for an ultra-reliable product, don’t incentivise your purchasing department to source components as cheaply as possible (which is often the default practice). If a product fails, any money saved by the purchasing department will be vastly outweighed by reputational damage to your brand and potentially lost future sales.
To express the same point another way, make sure that your policies and plans across all of your business functions are pulling in the same direction. When all your efforts reinforce each other, this multiplies the impact of your strengths.
By now, it should have become clear that designing strategy is an iterative process. As people make new strategy proposals, management needs to evaluate all of the potential knock-on effects on other parts of the business before green-lighting them.
For example, you might have spotted that a lot of potential new customers exist who would start buying from you if you launched a more basic, cheaper version of your product. This could generate a significant new profit stream. But is there a risk that some of your existing customers would decide they don’t need all of the features of your existing product and would trade down to the new, cheaper one as well? You might even end up worse off overall.
Getting the senior management team discussing issues like these can often reveal that different people have different ideas about what the strengths of your business actually are. If so, managers may also differ on what the strategies and goals of the business should be. A process of debate like this can generate greater clarity about how the business creates value for its customers and how it could further strengthen its capabilities.
How a business advisor can help you: Making sure that your strategy initiatives don’t collide can be one of the trickiest elements of developing strategy. That’s because it can require some people or teams to sacrifice some element of their own performance for the wider good of the company. Using an external advisor can help defuse potential tensions by keeping the debate focused on agreed data and objective arguments and preventing it from becoming personalised.
Strategy demands focus – it’s about choosing priorities
The process of creating good strategy can sometimes be complicated. Yet the outcome should not be complicated – it should be as simple as possible. That’s because, for a strategy to succeed, it usually needs to be focused.
Let’s bear in mind that companies often have many different opportunities to grow their revenues. Here are some of the main axes that companies can grow along:
Customers. They may be able to sell more to their existing customers and win new customers in the same industry.
Products. They may be able to add valuable new features to existing products and develop complementary new products.
Geographic. They may be able to start selling in new regions or new countries.
Value. They may be able to introduce ancillary service lines, offer financing solutions, and so on.
Yet companies can’t do everything effectively. Most companies face three main bottlenecks:
Management. This is the biggest bottleneck for many companies. Top management has huge demands on its time. It can only take on so many responsibilities before it will drop the ball.
Staff. A company’s ability to recruit, retain and direct a sufficient number of qualified staff is another common limiting factor.
Finance. Resources are generally not limitless.
Bearing this in mind, it is vital for a company to concentrate its resources if it is going to achieve its most important objectives. When a company spreads its efforts too widely, this usually leads to middling results in everything rather than great results in the few areas that really make a difference.
How a business advisor can help you: Keeping your strategy process focused is another tricky area, because it sometimes requires the CEO to say ‘no’ to some individuals or departments. Nobody likes being told that a project idea they love isn’t well enough aligned with the company’s key strengths. Nobody appreciates being told that a favourite project idea has been side-lined to make space for a project from another department.
Again, using an external advisor can keep everyone focused on objective arguments and reduce the risk that debate becomes personalised. In some cases, a CEO who feels outnumbered by managers that tend to overstretch the company’s resources may bring in an advisor precisely in order to have another voice in the room arguing for focus.
Is strategy the same as a business plan?
This is a good moment to mention the difference between strategy and a business plan. A good business plan will reflect many of the conclusions that should come out of a strategy review, including target customer groups, required product capabilities, sales channels and so on. But the two are different.
Strategy is all-purpose and required 24/7 but a business plan is usually created for a particular purpose. Most often, the purpose is to raise capital — whether it’s a startup business raising equity from angel investors or an established firm tapping a bank for a loan.
A business plan usually contains a lot of projections and targets – mainly financial ones. It tends towards confidence and certainty, rather than acknowledging uncertainty. By implication, not reaching the targets in a business plan is seen as a failure.
But the real world is uncertain. Developing business strategy should reflect that by being dynamic and flexible. For example, if market conditions change in unexpected ways that open up different and more appealing objectives, a company should be able to pivot to new, more appropriate strategies. Continuing to follow strategies just because they are set down in a business plan would make little sense.
So a business plan reflects a snapshot in time, while strategy is always a work in progress. The principles that underlie strategy are timeless, but the outcome is never finished and complete.
Leading strategy author Richard Rumelt puts it like this:
‘Good strategy is built on functional knowledge of what works, what doesn’t, and why… A new strategy is, in the language of science, a hypothesis, and its implementation is an experiment. As results appear, good leaders learn more about what does and doesn’t work and adjust their strategies accordingly.‘ [3]
Max McKeown emphasises that strategy that works today will almost inevitably become obsolete at some point in the future, because the world changes. He implicitly contrasts the mindset of a business strategist with the mindset of a business planner:
Any fool can produce a plan. The genius is in seeing how new events open up new possibilities for the old plan. Or even entirely new plans that weren’t possible when the old plan was written’. [4]
What are the most common pitfalls when creating strategy?
Too many companies get strategy wrong. Here are some of the most common strategy mistakes that companies make and that you can avoid.
Confusing goals with strategy
Perhaps the most common strategy mistake is not having one at all. Many companies think they have a strategy, when in fact they don’t. What they have is goals.
Consider these examples:
‘Our strategy is to become the market leader in our industry.’
‘Our strategy is to double our turnover in the next five years.’
‘Our strategy is to generate 30% of our sales from exports by 2025.’
‘Our strategy is to win five new Tier 1 customers each year.‘
‘Our strategy is to have the best reputation for customer service in our industry.’
These are goals, not strategies. And goals don’t achieve themselves.
When companies announce goals, unsupported by strategy, and then fail to reach them, managers often scratch their heads trying to understand where they went wrong. Despite putting in a huge effort, they fell short. They often tell themselves that they failed to execute their strategy effectively when they actually never had a strategy to begin with.
Confusing strategy creation with budgeting and financial planning
A close relation of confusing strategy with goals is confusing strategy with your annual financial budget. It’s true that strategy is worthless if it fails to create a profitable business, measured in pounds and pence. But your budget cannot be your strategy.
A financial budget is an answer to the question: ‘what financial results do we expect next year’? Companies that create a budget and call it a strategy have just re-labelled their financial planning process, not launched a process to formulate a successful business strategy.
Strategy starts by analysing your company’s strengths and the opportunities in your industry. From this, management develops a set of initiatives to convert opportunity into profitable growth. Financial results are an output of this process, not an input.
Failure to focus
Companies sometimes struggle to stay focused, because focus is about saying ‘no’ to opportunities as much as it is about saying ‘yes’. Saying no to things is mentally hard. For example, if some members of management are very keen to pursue a new initiative, the boss may be reluctant to say ‘no’ in case it is taken as a lack of trust and confidence in their abilities.
In the short run, it is easier to allow everyone to have what they want. Yet in the longer term it will mean expending the firm’s energies across too many initiatives. It’s critical to decide which are the firm’s biggest strengths that create the most value for customers and pursue the opportunities that are aligned with those. Don’t make the mistake of trying to chase every idea that your firm might be able to make a go of.
To some bosses, focusing narrowly may feel unambitious. It need not be. In any event, be sure to keep your strategies practical and achievable – they must have a realistic chance of success. Strategy should make full use of the company’s staff, financial and other resources but without overwhelming the management team’s experience and execution capacity.
Maintaining a focused approach will not only equip your company to deliver better results for your customers, it will also make it easier to communicate to your customers the benefits they will gain from doing business with your company. A laser-sharp marketing message is much more effective than a claim that ‘we’re pretty good at everything’. There is an old adage in marketing: if you’re marketing to everyone, you’re marketing to no one.
Equating strategy with marketing
Some businesses have a one-sided focus on growth. In the right circumstances, growth can create tremendous wealth for a business owner. But an unbalanced focus on growth can also cause a business to come unstuck.
Companies with a one-sided focus on growth often equate strategy with marketing. If growth is their dominant objective to the exclusion of all others, then it feels natural for marketing to be their strategy – there is no need for any other.
Companies that take this approach assume that growing turnover will automatically lead to rising profits. But this may not be the case at all. More marketing will only lead to sustained revenue growth if the product provides customers with distinctive benefits. In other words, the product needs to be either cheaper than competitor products or else distinctive in some way that customers value.
If the product-market match isn’t right, marketing may generate some sales to customers who will buy once. But the profit on the first sale to a new customer is often little more than the cost of the associated marketing spend (the ‘customer acquisition cost’). Sometimes, that first sale can even be loss-making.
For marketing to generate a sustained increase in profits, it must win new customers who become repeat buyers. Making future sales to those repeat buyers requires little or no further marketing spend – they have already tried your product and they like it. But customers won’t repeat buy if the product offer isn’t right.
Don’t make the mistake of trying to force growth by marketing a product that offers no compelling benefit in features or price over competitor products. If you do, you will be trying to grow in an area where your company has no natural advantage. And selling me-too products at me-too prices is usually a recipe for meagre profits.
Costly differentiation strategies that ignore the need to be profitable
Some companies appreciate the need to differentiate their products, but then fall into a related trap.
Differentiating your product usually involves higher costs than you would incur to produce a standard product.
For example, if your product has higher performance features or you offer a customised service to your clients, this is likely to involve spending extra money. If you decide on a plan to reduce the carbon emissions from your business this may set you apart from your competitors but, once again, it may cost you a significant amount of money.Â
If you have a decision to take about a product differentiation strategy, think carefully about how valuable the differentiating features would be to your customers. If they are valuable enough, your customers will normally pay a premium for the superior product that more than offsets your extra costs to deliver it. But if the additional customer benefit is small, the differentiation strategy may be unprofitable.
When you are thinking about differentiation strategies more generally, a key question is: in what areas can we differentiate in ways that are cost-efficient? Identify the areas in which your company is uniquely well placed to differentiate cost-efficiently and, if the differentiation is valuable for customers, focus on these.
Doing DIY strategy rather than seeking advice from a business strategist or business advisor
Some managers assume that, simply because they are experts in their product or service, they will be able to turn that expertise into a profitable business. As we have already seen, developing strategy uses skills that are not part of the day-to-day routine of many executives.
The clue is in an executive’s job title. Their job is to execute – to get things done – whereas the job of a business strategist is to think methodically, analytically and creatively. Executives sometimes move to action too soon because they feel that, if they are not moving things forward, they are not spending their time valuably.
Developing strategies through which a business can generate value from its unique strengths is one of the most profitable uses of an executive’s time. Some executives have a natural gift for this. For others, seeking outside support from a business strategist or a business advisor can be a smart decision.
How you can get better at strategy
How can executives get better at formulating strategy themselves or at participating in group sessions to create strategy for their business?
Every business is unique. Some businesses will be similar in terms of their industry, their size and their commercial circumstances. Yet even these will have unique combinations of ownership, management personalities, workforce skills and so on. There is no out-of-the-box guide that every business executive can use to learn how to ‘do strategy’ that works in every situation.
However, here are a few suggestions about attitudes and behaviours that are valuable in most situations and can help you refine your talent for developing strategy:
Proactively ask open questions: How can we do this better? Why do we do it at all? It can repay to ask basic questions about the parts of your business or industry that you think you know best – this can be where blind spots exist and changes creep up unnoticed.
Look outside your company, not just inside: For example, what are the problems that your customers need solutions to? Does your company have the expertise to solve these in a way that would be profitable for you?
Seek a diversity of viewpoints: Solicit input from colleagues with a diverse range of perspectives or functional expertise. Avoid the trap of group-think. If everyone involved in a decision agrees on the right course of action without any dissent, appoint a devil’s advocate to make the case for something different.
Be adaptive and open to change: The world is always changing and what makes your company successful today will probably not work forever. Circumstances change and a good business can easily find itself in difficulty. What will your company need to do to be successful in five or ten years from now?
Make time for thinking and reading: Not only about your own industry, but about the wider world. Trends in technology, social attitudes, politics and regulation can have minimal impact in the short term but huge impacts over 5-10 years. Formulating and executing strategies to capitalise on opportunities or ward off threats can take a long time, so the earlier you start thinking about them, the better you will be positioned to respond.
Don’t disparage competitors — ask what they are doing well: Especially, don’t disparage departing customers – find out why they are leaving you, and do it as quickly as you can.
Even if your business is enjoying a lot of success, preserve some humility: Andy Grove, widely seen as the driving force behind the ascent of Intel to the pinnacle of the global microchip industry, famously wrote: ‘Only the Paranoid Survive’[5]. Accept that there is much that all of us don’t know. Be aware that all of us have biases in the way we think, which often tend to reinforce our existing convictions. For a brilliant elucidation of this, see Chapter 7 of Robert Cialdini’s classic book ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion’[6] in which he writes about the power of the psychological principle of Commitment and Consistency.
[1] McKeown, M. (2012) The Strategy Book. 3rd Ed. Harlow, Pearson Education Limited. For more about Max McKeown’s profile and work, see https://uk.linkedin.com/in/maxmckeown. [2] Porter, M. (1985) Competitive Advantage. New York, Simon & Schuster Inc. For more about Michael Porter’s life and work, see his biography page at Harvard Business School here: https://www.isc.hbs.edu/about-michael-porter/biography/Pages/default.aspx , where he is Bishop William Lawrence University Professor. [ use his [3] Rumelt, R. (2011) Good Strategy/ Bad Strategy. 4th Ed. London, Profile Books Ltd. Richard Rumelt is one of the world’s most renowned authors on strategy. For more about Richard Rumelt’s life and work, see his biography page at the UCLA Anderson School of Management here: https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty-and-research/strategy/faculty/rumelt#tab-biography , where he is Professor Emeritus. [4] McKeown, M. The Strategy Book. Pearson Education Limited (2012) [5] Grove, A. (1996) Only the Paranoid Survive. London, Profile Books Ltd. Despite Intel’s immense success under his leadership, Grove never stopped focusing on the risk that massive change could one day upend the industry, and with it Intel’s leadership. His classic book delves into his thinking on this phenomenon, which he called the Strategic Inflection Point. Andy Grove died in 2016. [6] Cialdini, R. (1984) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. New York, Harper Business. For more about Robert Cialdini’s books and other work, see https://www.influenceatwork.com/.