A Stanford Business School professor with 22 years of experience shares core strategy principles: break your vision into 5-year, 1-year, and quarterly goals; keep strategic priorities to 3-5; seek blue ocean markets instead of competing in crowded ones; scale your best customers and products; remove bottlenecks. A second speaker pushes back on the 5-year timeline, suggesting 3 years works better.
In 22 years of teaching at Stanford Business School, here are the top 11 things that I teach in under 3 minutes. To hit that vision, put it in writing, and then break it down into 5-year goals, 1-year goals, and quarterly goals, and hold your team accountable to the quarterly goals.
Love the quarterly goals. I would say just do 3-year targets, break those into those quarterly goals. You can skip the 5-year, which is too long. You can skip the 1-year, which is too short. If you got the quarterly, you don't need the 1-year.
Most leaders don't fail because they do too little. They fail because they try to do too much. At any given time, only have 3 to 5 core strategic priorities.
Yeah, I'd go one step further and say that you should only have one right next thing for your company.
Find a blue ocean. A red ocean is a market where everyone is doing the same thing, fighting for the same customers. A blue ocean is one where your product or your solution or your service stands on its own.
Yeah, easy to say, hard to do. I say leverage better messaging to position a red ocean product as a blue ocean product. Through the creation of a unique mechanism, but that's probably a different video for a different day. I just think magically asserting that you are in a blue ocean when you're not is kind of tough. So yep, good advice, hard to implement.
Number 8, scale your bright spots. Those are your best customers, your best products, or your best people. You'll make 10 times more money doubling down on what's working than you will trying to fix what's broken.
Yeah, I agree in principle. At the same time, you need to always identify and eliminate bottlenecks and constraints. So you can't completely ignore what's broken. If you ignore the stuff that's broken, that's ultimately going to stall you out. So yep, we do want to double down on the things that are working, but we, we want to make sure that we're identifying, hey, where's the constraint? Where's the bottleneck? Let's unblock those bottlenecks. That's kind of one of the primary roles of a CEO.
There's a lot here, so I'm going to cover the rest in part 3.
