Quote

We mislead ourselves when we pretend we can make someone into an effective manager by putting them through a few courses in business school.

A strategy is something like, an innovative new product; globalization, taking your products around the world; be the low-cost producer. A strategy is something you can touch; you can motivate people with; be number one and number two in every business. You can energize people around the message.

Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world.

Strategy is, at some level, the ability to predict what's going to happen, but it's also about understanding the context in which it is being formulated. And then you have to be open-minded to the fact that you're not going to get it right at the very beginning.

The way most people approach business - and the way they mostly teach in business school - involves the analytical mind. It divides it up and looks at parts in isolation.

Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different.

Founders have continually struggled with and adapted the 'big business' tools, rules, and processes taught in business schools when startups failed to execute 'the plan,' never admitting to the entrepreneurs that no startup executes to its business plan.

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline, organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self critical.

It's important to have a really clear strategy so when you are in business, you only have to make micro-strategy changes.