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

by David B. Yoffie, Michael A. Cusumano

Overview

The authors of the bestselling Competing on Internet Time (a Business Week top 10 book) analyze the strategies, principles, and skills of three of the most successful and influential figures in business—Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs—offering lessons for all managers and entrepreneurs on leadership, strategy and execution.

In less than a decade, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Andy Grove founded three companies that would define the world of technology and transform our lives. At their peaks, Microsoft, Apple, and Intel were collectively worth some $1.5 trillion. Strategy Rules examines these three individuals collectively for the first time—their successes and failures, commonalities and differences—revealing the business strategies and practices they pioneered while building their firms.

David B. Yoffie and Michael A. Cusumano have studied these three leaders and their companies for more than thirty years, while teaching business strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship at Harvard and MIT. In this enlightening guide, they show how Gates, Grove, and Jobs approached strategy and execution in remarkably similar ways—yet markedly differently from their erstwhile competitors—keeping their focus on five strategic rules.

Strategy Rules brings together the best practices in strategic management and high-tech entrepreneurship from three path-breaking entrepreneurs who emerged as CEOs of huge global companies. Their approaches to formulating strategy and building organizations offer unique insights for start-up executives as well as the heads of modern multinationals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062373977
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/14/2015
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

David B. Yoffie is the Max and Doris Starr Professor of International Business Administration at Harvard Business School.  One of Intel’s longest-serving board members from 1989 to 2018, he has served on numerous high tech boards. Yoffie has written more than 200 case studies, which sold more than 4 million copies. He is the author or co-author of ten books, and has written extensively for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Michael A. Cusumano is the SMR Distinguished Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has been a dean and vice president at Tokyo University of Science and has published over 130 articles and 13 books, including Competing on Internet Time and Strategy Rules (both with David Yoffie), Platform Leadership (with Annabelle Gawer), as well as Microsoft Secrets (with Richard Selby), The Business of Software, and Staying Power.  He lives in Groton and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction: The Making of a Master Strategist 1

Chapter 1 Look Forward, Reason Back 23

Chapter 2 Make Big Bets, Without Betting the Company 61

Chapter 3 Build Platforms and Ecosystems-Not Just Products 93

Chapter 4 Exploit Leverage and Power- Play Judo and Sumo 131

Chapter 5 Shape the Organization around Your Personal Anchor 165

Conclusion: Lessons for the Next Generation 199

Notes 217

Index 239

Editorial Reviews

Warts and all, here is the inside story on how three unlikely leaders changed the world forever and created a trillion dollars of market cap. Two brilliant business professors with unique access provide lessons for any business and its leaders.” — Scott Cook, Founder & Chairman, Intuit

“No one but these co-authors could have distilled the histories of these great CEOs and their world-changing firms into a handful of lucid and logical guidelines for all strategic thinking. Everyone in business —whether in big companies or small — should read, mark, and digest this book.” — Reed Hundt, CEO, Coalition for Green Capital; former chairman, FCC

“Brilliantly and accurately explains how these legendary high-tech CEOs shaped the world we live in. A must read for today’s aspiring leaders”. — John Sculley, former Apple CEO

“This is not just about strategy for technology companies but about how bold, passionate and deeply knowledgeable leaders work. It is required reading for those who aspire to push the boundaries of business. ” — John Browne, former CEO BP and former board member of Intel

From the Publisher

Brilliantly and accurately explains how these legendary high-tech CEOs shaped the world we live in. A must read for today’s aspiring leaders”.

John Sculley

This is not just about strategy for technology companies but about how bold, passionate and deeply knowledgeable leaders work. It is required reading for those who aspire to push the boundaries of business.

John Browne

No one but these co-authors could have distilled the histories of these great CEOs and their world-changing firms into a handful of lucid and logical guidelines for all strategic thinking. Everyone in business —whether in big companies or small — should read, mark, and digest this book.

Reed Hundt

Warts and all, here is the inside story on how three unlikely leaders changed the world forever and created a trillion dollars of market cap. Two brilliant business professors with unique access provide lessons for any business and its leaders.

Scott Cook

2015-01-22
The co-authors of the bestselling Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and Its Battle with Microsoft (1999) attempt to extract timeless principles of strategic leadership from the unique business-building skills of tech titans Bill Gates of Microsoft, Andrew Grove of Intel and Steve Jobs of Apple.Yoffie (International Business Administration/Harvard Business School) and Cusumano (Management and Engineering/MIT) revisit the careers of the three individuals perhaps most responsible for conceiving and producing the history-making shift to personal computers in the 1980s. "None of the three," the authors write, "was the type of well-rounded general manager that top business schools…try to produce." All mostly self-taught, they lacked formal business training and learned leadership and organizing skills on the job. They were strategic thinkers who put countless time and effort into the thought and research necessary to maintain their companies' rapid developments. Throughout their careers, they competed against each other—especially Gates and Jobs—as fiercely as they did their other business rivals. Yoffie and Cusumano distill from their combined histories five principles, and they address, and further differentiate, each in its own chapter. These include "Look Forward, Reason Back," "Making Big Bets, Without Betting the Company," "Building Platforms and Ecosystems—Not Just Products," "Exploit Leverage and Power—Play Judo and Sumo," and "Shape the Organization Around Your Personal Anchor." While delineating these principles, the authors don't overlook the sometimes-underhanded, borderline illegal processes of the respective companies. Microsoft's ruthless pursuit of monopoly power left a trail of vanquished competitors, and Intel achieved its monopoly through manufacturing prowess and extreme defensiveness. The circumstances each company addressed were specific enough, as was the learning process required for mastery, to perhaps undermine the authors' claims for the timelessness of their five principles, but the lessons should be useful for managers and entrepreneurs. A provocative account of the outsized contributions of these modern-day robber barons.

Kirkus Review