Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explains why most companies get strategy wrong

My problem with most strategy conversations is that they're always inward out. You know, we establish, well, first, we're the best in the world because everybody thinks that, which can't possibly be true. And second, we see that all of our products are going to be successful and therefore we'll be very successful in the future. And that's usually how strategy is done in businesses. I prefer a completely different approach. Work very, very, very hard to figure out what the world's going to look like in five years. What will people be doing, what will your customers want, where will costs will be? In our case, what will networks look like, how important will phones be, what will the apps look like, what services? And spend an awful lot of time on that and then take a look at your offerings. If you think about in the media business, there are media businesses that are growing very well and others that are in great trouble. This is completely predicted five years ago. So the leaders and the ones that are in trouble should have done a five year plan and said, holy cow, what are we going to do? What are the things we can do? Or maybe we sell ourselves or we try something different. Almost nobody does a five year plan. Most businesses do a one to two year plan.