Book Review: Learning from Bill, Andy, and Steve

The tuxedoed trio looking out from the cover of Harvard Business School Professor David B. Yoffie’s new book on strategy can be seen as the modern-day Mount Rushmore of business. At their peaks, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Intel’s Andy Grove, and Apple’s Steve Jobs were collectively worth $1.5 trillion and heading companies that would change entirely how we work, play, and live our lives.

With Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs, Yoffie and MIT Sloan professor Michael A. Cusumano identify the common magic mojo management practices of a trio who were individually very different people but who shared a similar drive. “All three were enormously ambitious and dreamed big dreams—not so much for themselves as for their companies,” write Yoffie and Cusumano, who previously teamed up to write Competing on Internet Time. “They were determined to have an impact.”

The good news, according to the authors, is that most successful executives can learn over time how to think more strategically and execute more effectively. “Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs were not born as great strategists: Jobs almost bankrupted the company during his first stint with Apple….It was their ability to learn—about strategy, execution, and new domains within their own businesses—that made them such effective leaders over such long periods of time.”

The authors say the trio mastered five rules of strategy:

1. Look forward, reason back. Figure out where you want your company to be in five years, then reason back to identify steps to get you there.
2. Make big bets, without betting the company. Be bold, go for big wins, but not in a reckless way.
3. Build platforms and ecosystems—not just products. Create a network that brings together powerful partners engaged in complementary product and service innovation.
4. Exploit leverage and power. If you have it, use your large size to advantage, but also be smarter and more agile than your opponents.
5. Shape the organization around your personal anchor. These were not well-rounded executives, but each played to their own strengths and hired to fill their weaknesses. Jobs, for example, was passionate about product design, so that is where he focused much of his effort.

The biggest mistake they made, according to the book, was in anointing loyal followers to succeed them rather than new visionaries. “They could have looked for new leaders more attuned to the next generation of technology, customers, and competitors, or encouraged a more competitive succession process.”

What I'm Reading

“A wonderfully written book about eight CEOs (some of whom you won’t have heard of) who built unbelievably successful organizations. Well-researched by HBSMBAs and eminently readable. The author is not a big fan of corporate overhead.”
—Professor Warren McFarlan, on The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success, by William N. Thorndike Jr.

(Photos: Harvard Business School)

“The author, a practicing physician and professor at Harvard’s Medical School and School of Public Health, argues that end-of-life quality is an important goal that is often overlooked and offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting those with debilitating chronic illnesses and the dependent elderly.”
—Professor Lynda Applegate, on Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande

Excerpt

“Gerontologists tell us that challenging ourselves later in life with new experiences, situations, and learning will keep us more mentally sharp and physically fit than a routine without these. Wendy and I wanted to work hard for a cause, but we also wanted to take advantage of our situation and take in all that we could of the culture and sights that surrounded us. We wanted to make our time in Africa an adventure. We wanted to explore. We wanted to experience the idiosyncrasies of the local environment and culture. So we did.”

—Rick Walleigh (MBA 1974) on his late career change, as recounted in his new book, coauthored with his wife, Wendy Walleigh, From Silicon Valley to Swaziland: How One Couple Found Purpose and Adventure in an Encore Career

Quoted

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“We’ve now surveyed thousands of executives at hundreds of companies, and they’re always shocked to see how poorly their strategy is understood. And what’s interesting to me is not that their strategy is poorly understood—we’ve known that for a while—it’s how surprised they are. I think what’s going on is this: Most executives, when they think about strategy…focus on communication, and they measure communication in terms of the numbers of emails they send or the number of town hall meetings they hold. Wrong measure. That’s all about inputs. What really matters is the output, and one output in particular: how well managers throughout the organization understand what the strategy is and what it means for them.”
—MIT Sloan senior lecturer Donald Sull (MBA 1992, DBA 1996), discussing his March 2015 Harvard Business Review article, “Why Strategy Execution Unravels—and What to Do about It”

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