What is your key takeaway?
At the end of each class, I ask that all students spend 2-3 minutes thinking of their key takeaway. This helps us to reflect on what we learned. It also allows me (the teacher) to see if there is any confusion or things to clarify.
Since I teach a lot of students x a lot of classes = that’s a lot of “key takeaways.” For this semester, it was 4,500.
Send out meeting minutes to students
This is something we do regularly in the corporate world, AND I do it at school too. For each session, I will curate some of the students “key takeaways” and re-publish it out to the attendees. It’s a smart way to catalog the key themes of the day, and frankly, I use these bullet points to also create exam questions. After all, they are the main things we learned. Blue font are quotes from students; dates are approximate.
August 24:
- Competitive advantage/strategic advantage is really about tradeoffs. (LS)
- Culture eats strategy for breakfast (ZQ)
- Strategy is how you deal with competition (MH)
August 31:
- Strategy is more like poker, not like chess. You can’t control external factors or predict the moves of the opponents. There is a factor of luck involved. (HA)
- In order to be a level 5 leader, one must have a combination of willpower and humility which is vary rare. (MC)
- Best Practices are what it takes to play the game. Differentiation is what it takes to win. (TP)
Sept 6:
- Good strategy acknowledges and addresses your biases. (AD)
- Really good companies change the game (DC)
- Strategy does not have to be top-down, it can be bottom up too. (SK)
Sept 11:
- Having too many suppliers can be like going on too many first dates. (DM)
- Industry structure is like the landscape not like the weather. This means that it changes in a relatively stable way. (LK)
- Firm performance is affected by industry effects (~20%), firm effects (~55%), and other factors (~25%). Industry matters but management matters more. (AL)
Sept 13:
- Profitable industries paradox: Fastest growing profits/attractiveness and increased industry players/competition – reduced sustainability. (TF)
- Incumbent companies want to make it difficult for new companies to enter (AD)
- If you are competing on price, you are in trouble. (JB)
Sept 18:
- Strategy is about winning, but this doesn’t necessarily mean diminishing the competition – instead, focus on providing the most value you can to your customers, or to take it a step further, get to the level where you are playing a different game than everyone else. (MZ)
- Strategy is finding your unfair advantage (CZ)
- Core competencies helps you make a decision on corporate strategy (AK)
Sept 27:
- Socialize before presenting your deck! (AD)
- Ask the SO WHAT about your recommendations. (EPM)
- Frameworks are like kitchen tools, the goal is not to demonstrate you know how to use the tools but can you cook good food. (AT)
Oct 2:
- Ratios can be compared (1) over time and (2) within an industry. Single data points aren’t particularly useful – always examine trends. (AL)
- For strategy, focus on leading indicators more than lagging indicators (MM)
- Don’t be a business robot, use a sniff test (VS)
Oct 4:
- Consultants work with Income Statements, bankers with Balance Sheets (LM)
- Don’t be a business robot – apply context to ensure everything makes sense. (SP)
- Liquidity is in the short term (think suppliers) & solvency is in the long term (think bond holders!) (KJ)
Oct 9:
- Internal benchmarking has less causal ambiguity and the company data is readily available. (SM)
- Business model = how company makes money (CL)
- “Financial Ratios: Tools for Businessmen; Stethoscope: Tool for Doctors” (SS)
Oct 11:
- The marginal cost for digital products with subscription products is almost 0 (DR)
- Choosing to attract customers using purely discounts is very unsustainable (CP)
- A good subscription business model solves a customer’s “forever problem”, which is recurring job to be done that keep customers as lifelong customers (LJ)
Oct 16:
- Branding is important for products with low involvement (i.e. beverages). (RM)
- You can either scale up or niche down, the worst thing is being in the middle (ST)
- Government tend to regulate horizontal integration more than vertical integration. (DB)
Oct 18:
- Slow growth means an industry is becoming more of a zero-sum game. This results in consolidation, as firms need to fight for market share. (AF)
- Cost structure matters. MR>MC as long as this is true you will earn more revenue than cost. (AT)
- A key benefit of vertical integration is that it offers companies greater CONTROL over their supply chain, etc. (IN)
Nov 6:
- Moore’s Law- the observation, computing power doubles every 18-24 months at the same cost (CZ)
- The main point of crossing the chasm is attracting more customers who are risk averse. (LS)
- Disruptive innovation is doing less for less while sustaining innovation is doing more for less. (Everyone)
Nov 8:
- It may not be the first mover who wins, but it is the first to scale. (RW)
- Being the first mover is like cooking without a recipe. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. If it works, it’s likely that it took a lot of trial and error. If it’s really, really good, it will probably become a new recipe. (AL)
- Over the lifespan of an industry, sometimes decline can take decades, meaning there are still a lot of profits to be captured in declining industries. (JR)
Nov 13:
- Business strategy is how to compete and corporate strategy is where to compete. Both strategies should be aligned for the correct performance of firms. However, this does not happen really often. (GS)
- Vertical integration is difficult to reverse and can lead to core rigidities as you have less strategic flexibility. (JK)
- Organisations are going to have constructive tension between business units or functions. This healthy as long as there is trust and then you are able to make decisions. (LW)
Nov 15:
- Amazon’s delivery choices are an example of tradeoffs. Instead of delivering everything, everywhere they focus on high-volume centers. (CK)
- Downstream→ towards the customer; Upstream→ away from the customer (JM)
- When you vertically integrate, you gain new competitors/enemies. This is apparent with Amazon entering into the shipping business; UPS and FedEx used to be their distributors, now they are competitors. (SK)
Nov 20:
- When doing m&a, you need to pass the 3 tests: attractiveness, cost of entry, and better off tests. (HP)
- Deal is the wedding, integration is the marriage. Weddings are fun, marriages can be hard (culture clashes, consolidation (layoffs), baggage, leadership changes, etc). (MO)
- Companies can develop a core competency in M&A through the learning curve of experience. (LE)
Nov 22:
- An organization is just a sum of decisions. (MN)
- Culture is what you’re willing to enforce (JQ)
- A downside of matrix structure is “a lot of CCs on emails” – communication can lag (JW)
Nov 27:
- Doing everything right and still losing is a good failure that makes you better (JW)
- Growth is really good… until it’s not. Super important to be aware of how your company changes as it grows. (CK)
- It is a growth paradox, growth creates complexity, and complexity kills growth (CZ)
Last day of class
The last day of class is special. a) we recap the semester for 10 minutes b) then the students fill out an evaluation of the class content, and me as an instructor c) I share some war stories and discuss strategy & your career. A lot of the key points are things I’ve come to believe and wrote about on this blog:
- Life is a bunch of S-curves here
- Professional services is an apprenticeship here
- Build relational equity, before you need it here
- Invest in people, experiences, assets, writing, and gratitude here
- Be so good they can’t ignore you here
What’s your career strategy?
So, I asked 200+ students to write about their own career strategy. As I said at the beginning, I emphatically did NOT have a career strategy at the age of 20. In fact, I first thought about management consulting when I was 30 years old, and then turned it into a strategy, around the age of 40 (when I started this blog). So, as the students were typing in their responses, I gave some caveats:
- Of course, it’s okay if you don’t know with perfect clarity
- Think about what gives you energy and what you don’t mind spending 3-5 years getting really good at
- If I told you that in 10 years, you will make $$$,$$$ a year. . .what kind of work would you like to be doing?
- What are some the the strategically valuable (VRIO) resources that you have in your life?
- What do you like to “geek out” on and what do you know more about than anyone else around you?
The following blue font is from my students, I grouped them into strategy concepts
1. core competencies = What you’re uniquely good at
- Working with people and problem solving
- Leveraging my storytelling skills in a quant field
- Talent for making people laugh & cracking witty jokes
- Enjoy making data visuals and explaining data
- Being an adaptable and proactive leader who brings out the best in my team
- Apply to masters in music program
2. Strategy = playing your own game
- Work hard at my own pace
- I never want to be complacent. I want to be proud of what I do
- Effort leads to passion
- Don’t be afraid to be the John Stockton of your team…be a good number 2
- FOMO is bad thing that makes me unhappy and exhausting. In future, I should not compare my average day vs. everyone’s Best Day
- When something is mine, I have founder mentality and I love that feeling.
3. Strategy = evergreen, continuous improvement help and guidance
- Strengthen my mentors
- Ensure that I do not do the same thing repeatedly but rather learn and grow
- Become very knowledgeable about real estate
4. Emerging strategy = Win as you go
- Say yes to everything! Try new things and see where life takes me
- Be bold but humble. I’ve realized there are limitless barriers to what I ultimately want to achieve or where I want to be, so learning to be unafraid to go directly for what I want is my key to avoiding imposter syndrome
- College is an expensive way to make really good mistakes
5. Economic moat = be a category of 1
- Follow where we spend the most of our effort, not just the “passion”
- Comparison is for losers. Accept where you are and make a change
- Be indispensable and commit to increasing my own value
- Be a person that would be missed (a valuable resource)
- I can balance objective ideas with conceptual ones
6. Strategy = trade off, what you say “no” to
- Think smart and lazy – try to prioritize
- Learn how to say no
- I interned in finance industry and found I didn’t like it
- [After my internship] I realized that it is not something that I want to do
7. Vision, mission = define what winning means to you
- Prioritize happiness with family, friends and a good life
- No matter how life is going right now – good or bad – you will make it to the top right by the end
- “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
8. Strategy = creating long term value
- Surrounding myself with amazing, caring, intelligent, and responsible group of people that will help me succeed
- Bring solutions not problems
- You develop strategy over time not overnight
