The Strategy Paradox: Why committing to success leads to failure (and what to do about it) (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

One of BusinessWeek Magazine's top ten business books of 2007

Voted one of the five best strategy books of 2007 by Strategy and Business magazine

Advance praise for THE STRATEGY PARADOX

"One of the most important, realistic and useful books on strategy ever written. With consummate clarity and withering logic, Raynor confronts and resolves the paradox that while strategy requires commitment, much about the future is simply unknowable. It is an absolutely brilliant, lucidly written piece of scholarship."
--Clayton M. Christensen, Professor, Harvard Business School and author of the bestselling The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution

"Raynor has taken the next giant leap forward in strategy.  He demonstrates that much of what we know about creating value is true, but woefully incomplete.  By widening our focus from simply the pursuit of success to include ever-present uncertainty, Raynor does more than simply alert us to the long-ignored risk/return tradeoff -- he shows us how to break it."
--Jim Balsillie, co-CEO, Research in Motion (RIM)

"The best lesson in corporate strategy I have ever read. Everyone admits we do not know what the future holds, but most of us go on acting as though we do know what the future holds. That can be dangerous in the extreme. Raynor has it right: clearly and convincingly, he shows us why facing up to uncertainty is essential for sustainable success, and then he provides the tools and methods to achieve it."
--Peter L. Bernstein, author of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

"The Strategy Paradox is a most extraordinary business book: impeccably researched and argued, brutally honest and devoid of 'silver bullet' solutions to today's complex strategy problems. It has profound implications for business strategy research , teach... --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Review

One of BusinessWeek Magazine's top ten business books of 2007

Voted one of the five best strategy books of 2007 by Strategy and Business magazine

Advance praise for THE STRATEGY PARADOX

"One of the most important, realistic and useful books on strategy ever written. With consummate clarity and withering logic, Raynor confronts and resolves the paradox that while strategy requires commitment, much about the future is simply unknowable. It is an absolutely brilliant, lucidly written piece of scholarship."
--Clayton M. Christensen, Professor, Harvard Business School and author of the bestselling The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution

"Raynor has taken the next giant leap forward in strategy.  He demonstrates that much of what we know about creating value is true, but woefully incomplete.  By widening our focus from simply the pursuit of success to include ever-present uncertainty, Raynor does more than simply alert us to the long-ignored risk/return tradeoff -- he shows us how to break it."
--Jim Balsillie, co-CEO, Research in Motion (RIM)

"The best lesson in corporate strategy I have ever read. Everyone admits we do not know what the future holds, but most of us go on acting as though we do know what the future holds. That can be dangerous in the extreme. Raynor has it right: clearly and convincingly, he shows us why facing up to uncertainty is essential for sustainable success, and then he provides the tools and methods to achieve it."
--Peter L. Bernstein, author of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

"The Strategy Paradox is a most extraordinary business book: impeccably researched and argued, brutally honest and devoid of 'silver bullet' solutions to today's complex strategy problems. It has profound implications for business strategy research , teaching and practice and should be read by anyone interested in why some strategies succeed while other equally-thoughtful strategies fail."
-- Hugh Courtney, Distinguished Tyser Teaching Fellow, University of Maryland, and author of 20/20 Foresight : Crafting Strategy in an Uncertain World

"A rare and extremely valuable gem…. Raynor provides managers a sophisticated, accessible, and highly usable approach weaving time, choice, uncertainty, and risk into a rich treasury of insights"
--Andy Boynton, Dean, The Wallace E. Carroll School of Management, Boston College

"Very few executives or board members look forward to the annual corporate clairvoyant ritual known as strategic planning; in no small part because of the unspoken recognition that "our" crystal ball's vision of the future has no greater fidelity than the competition's glass sphere. Since luck has rarely proved to be a sustainable business model, there exists a desperate need for a system to implement that can manage the unmanageable: how do you commit resources now to service customers and markets that will emerge in a distant and inherently unpredictable future?

Just as Raynor succeeded in unlocking the mysteries behind innovation in The Innovator's Solution, The Strategy Paradox provides an intelligent, robust, practical compass that the non-telepathic can use to navigate through the inevitable course corrections that will be required along the journey to success. Drawing upon extensive data from business, probability, mathematical and behavioral sciences and graphically illustrating his thesis with real-world examples of both successes AND failures, Raynor beautifully explains how to create a portfolio of strategic options that will allow curative interventions as unforeseen circumstances and developments are inescapably encountered…. Raynor's approach to strategic planning is not only the best manual on the subject written to date, it is an essential survival tool."
-- William Hunter MD, Founder, President & CEO, Angiotech Pharmaceuticals

"A very timely book that penetrates to the core of strategy, namely how to balance commitment and flexibility in a world of increasing uncertainty. Michael Raynor is a gifted writer and thinker about business, bringing fresh examples and lucid insights to deeply challenging issues facing today's executives. … This book deserves to be read widely by managers and leaders alike."
--Paul J. H. Schoemaker, Adjunct Professor, Wharton Business School and Chairman of Decision Strategies International Inc., Author, Profiting from Uncertainty and Peripheral Vision

"Insightful, timely and relevant to the choices and commitments our company is contemplating. The external environment in which we will find ourselves in a few short years is very uncertain, where changes in regulations, the economy, competitors’ behavior, customer preferences, or new or disruptive technologies could each, or in combination, dramatically change the operating landscape. The ability to take bold action with urgency, while maintaining strategic flexibility, has never been more important."
--Dan Hesse, Chairman and CEO, Embarq Corporation

"Raynor's book is insightful in identifying the very real constraints to sustained business growth. Strategy Paradox offers an architectural plan to effect transformational growth in a risk averse climate. These concepts have been extremely helpful to me as I work to create options for promising future technologies while simultaneously managing inescapable strategic risk."
-- Dave Holveck, Vice President, Corporate Development, President, Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation

"If Stephen Jay Gould had written a business book, this would be it; Raynor provides the most logical, detailed, and enlightening explanation for why some products succeeded and some products failed. . . Read this book to learn how to deal with uncertainty before you suffer the same fate as dinosaurs."
--Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director, Garage Technology Ventures and author, The Art of the Start

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Broadway Business; 1 edition (February 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385516223
• ISBN-13: 978-0385516228
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #204,086 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

130 of 132 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Strategy Gets New Life, May 30, 2007

By	E. Rae (NJ, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As a strategy consultant, I'm always on the look out for the next book to either recommend to my clients, or that they are likely to gravitate towards, to be prepared with my opinion when asked about the work. And since I have been a fan of Clay Christensen and disruption theory and was looking forward to see what Raynor would do on his own. Thanks goodness for a relaxing the long weekend so I could finally make the time for this.

Also, I have never written a review before. Since I really liked the book and there seemed to be few comments yet doing it justice, I figured I would cut my teeth on this one.

Generally, I have to agree with the HBR review -- he's a disruptive thinker in his own right: this is an approach to corporate strategy that is new, combining the merits of commitment-based strategy with the inescapable need for flexibility. I am looking forward to practically applying the core concepts on behalf of my clients.

The Strategy Paradox: Hidden in Plain Sight

Raynor begins by demonstrating what many of us have long suspected but weren't able to come out and say: when it comes to traditional strategic planning, the emperor has no clothes. Established frameworks -- from Ansoff to Porter to Hamel to, for that matter, Christensen, are premised on an ability to decide today what will be successful tomorrow. We're told again and again that the future will yield its secrets if only we're smart enough and our analysis is rigorous enough.

But prediction is a dark art at best: the data are always ambiguous. Personally, I've never seen a single path forward as clearly the best choice. This means that unfortunately, the most successful strategies are necessarily based on big commitments: it is fine to want to be "agile" and commit only once the data are clear, but the company that guesses right in the face of ambiguity will always outperform the "wait and see" approach of the adapative enterprise.

And so you have to commit big if you want to win big, but when you commit big you create the risk of losing big. That's the Strategy Paradox: the same strategic positions that hold out the promise of extreme success create the possibility of extreme failure.

Raynor demonstrates this both anecdotally and with a truly extraordinary large-scale data set. Anecdotally, in Chapter 2 Raynor has a totally new take on Sony's Betamax and MiniDisc fiascos. The tendency is to look at strategic failures such as these and conclude that the perpetrators were just plain dumb. What Raynor shows is that the strategic choices made, at the time they were made, were perfectly reasonable. Better still, Raynor shows that the opposite choices -- the ones made by Matsuhshita (VHS) and Apple (iPod) respectively were also perfectly reasonable. And that's the point: the future is uncertain, but you have to commit if you want to win big. A "take-it-as-it-comes" approach might have avoided catastrophe, but at the cost of having any real hope of real success. The ultimate winners are determined by the outcomes of unpredictable future events -- in other words, luck.

Raynor then shows that this is not just a one-shot thing. In Chapter 3, drawing on fascinating survey data, he shows that companies with clear cost leadership or product differentiation strategic positions deliver higher average returns than firms that are "stuck in the middle". In other words, big commitments made extreme success much likelier. Now the bad news: those same "extreme" strategic positions have much higher frequency of bankruptcy. Raynor has identified true "strategic" uncertainty -- the risk attached the pursuit of a specific strategy. And it turns out that the better returns that come with commitment-based strategies come at the cost of a higher risk of failure. Raynor's Strategy Paradox is not just a theoretical proposition -- it is a general, empirical fact. I'm left to conclude that, as Raynor says, everything we know about strategy is true, but it's "dangerously incomplete". (I love the drama he infuses into my strategy discussions with clients and colleagues!)

So, there's a risk/return trade-off in strategy. Is this news? I think so: there is no strategy book before now that qualifies its advice on achieving greatness with the caveat that you're also increasing your chance of total failure. In fact, much of strategic thinking is based on the idea that higher returns are correlated with lower variance in returns, and so risk and return are inversely correlated. But these findings are polluted with survivor bias, something Raynor's data correct for, perhaps for the first time. By identifying and empirically substantiating the risk/return tradeoff in strategic planning, Raynor has made a material contribution to the field.

I was convinced that better prediction isn't the answer; if you're not, Raynor spends Chapter 5 talking about why we'll never be able to predict the future with the necessary accuracy, drawing heavily (and respectfully) on the work of N. N. Taleb and Stephen Wolfram in particular.

I was more sceptical of Raynor's claims that the "organizational adaptation" school didn't hold a useful answer, either, but I was largely won over, if only because, as Raynor points out, the adaptation school hasn't done a very good job of defining its own boundaries. In Chapter 4 Raynor begins to sketch out, for the first time, as far as I can tell, what those limits might be, and through this makes it clear that a better answer is needed.

Growth Options vs. Strategic Options

The commentary the book has received on this site doesn't seem to me to describe accurately the true nature of "Strategic Flexibility." Some have described it simply a "portfolio of alternatives" or a way to "invest small in uncertain ventures." This misses the point. Raynor is describing a way for different product groups or divisions in a company to make their own high-intensity commitments yet collectively face lower strategic uncertainty.

For example, in Chapter 7, MSFT in 1988, draws on Beinhocker (Origin of Wealth) but extends it. MSFT's portfolio was more than just different forays into the OS space: each division created capabilities that could be recombined to create a more effective OS strategy than was being explored by any given division. So, for instance, the company was exploring enterprise markets with Unix, consumer markets with Windows, and commercial markets with OS/2. This was not merely covering different bets; it was covering only those bets that could both survive on their own -- and so have growth option value -- and, depending on how the world turned out, be recombined to create a new strategy in the OS market -- and so have strategic option value.

This distinction, between growth options and strategic options, is a significant contribution to the real options field. Raynor's Chapter 7 discussion of BCE (a Canadian telecoms company), brought the difference into focus for me. Growth options are essentially attempts to "run away" from your core business. So, if you're Enron and you think pipelines are boring and in decline, you get into energy trading as a way to pull yourself up by your bootstraps get out of that business. Trading is simply a "growth option" -- an option on entirely new growth trajectories.

Strategic options, on the other hand, are new businesses that are created in order to potentially reinvent and extend your existing core business. BCE got into systems consulting, e-commerce, and media, but not to escape its core telecoms operations; rather, BCE diversified in order to keep open the possibility of reinvigorating the core. At the corporate level, BCE didn't commit to these new initiatives, taking partial equity stakes in a number of different companies that it could dial up or down as circumstances warranted. But at the operating division level, those firms were entirely committed to achieving their own success.

As different market conditions or technologies evolved, BCE would be able to "exercise" its "strategic options" and completely change the strategy of the core telecoms unit but -- and this is the brilliant part -- without ever having had the core telecoms unit attempt to change itself. What Raynor also convinced me of is that strategic options are not an attempt to capture synergies. Strategic options aren't businesses that ARE related, they're businesses that might BECOME related. Strategic options create capabilities the core operations might need, often by forcing the corporate parent to invest in industries it doesn't understand. BCE had a portfolio of high-commitment strategies, but because each created strategic options -- not just a growth option -- for the others, the company as a whole had created a lower strategic risk profile.


Uncertainty and Strategic Flexibility

In the end, BCE wasn't able to follow through on its strategy, largely because, according to Raynor, the strategy was largely intuitive, and was not guided by a clear set of frameworks. That's something Raynor sets out to remedy, developing two powerful concepts largely through a case study of Johnson & Johnson that occupies all of chapter 8.

The first part of the solution is Requisite Uncertainty, described first in chapter 6, which is a powerful synthesis of Elliott Jacques's work on hierarchy with Raynor's insight into strategic uncertainty. He provides a powerful distinction between competitive strategy and corporate strategy: competitive strategy lives in the operating units, and is about generating returns; corporate strategy is about managing uncertainty by creating a portfolio of the necessary strategic and growth options.

The reason... Read more ›

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A significant intellectual contribution, April 6, 2007

By	Ariel - See all my reviews

A significant intellectual contribution and a welcome addition to the serious management literature.

The author basically argues that most studies of "great organizations" are incomplete because they compare companies that are spectacularly successful against those that are simply "mediocre." Drawing management practices solely from "great" companies in studies like these, he says, is fundamentally flawed, because they omit the most revealing comparison set, namely, those companies that have failed. His surprising finding is that when you compare the spectacular successes with the spectacular failures, they actually look pretty much the same: they both tend to have very clear strategies and consistent, focused execution against those strategies. The difference being that the failures simply picked the wrong strategy.

The "Strategy Paradox" is that the strategic bets you need to make to pursue "spectacular success" (high commitment of plant, capital, technology, etc.) simultaneously increase your odds for "spectacular failure." The rest of his book presents a mind-set and tool-set leaders can use to mitigate the risk inherent with high-return strategies, increasing their odds of success.

The job of the CEO is central to his approach. Basically, the CEO plays a "different in kind" strategic role. Instead of making strategic "commitments" (this role falls to operating unit leaders) and "executing" against them (this role falls to functional leaders), the CEO should be in the business of creating strategic "options," so that as the future changes, operating units have alternatives.

Because of the extreme uncertainty about how the future will turn out in the long term, the CEO's ability to create "real options" against various scenarios of how the future will turn out becomes critical to long-term organizational success. The CEO does this through intelligent investment (partial equity stakes in emerging technologies, etc.) and other mechanisms that create options that divisional leaders can "exercise" or "abandon" as the future unfolds.

I recommend this book highly and consider it one of the few true "paradigm shifting" books out there--meaning, one that can permanently affect your leadership mindset for the better!

31 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An important book on strategy; a "must " read, March 14, 2007

By	Alistair Davidson (Mountain View, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Assessment
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As a Contributing Editor to Strategy and Leadership magazine, I read a lot of strategy books. This is an excellent book, well worth reading. It's a must addition to the library of anyone interested in strategy. It's particularly useful for executives dealing with uncertain markets.

Strategy is a relatively new field. Many books and ideas in strategy are ill thought out and not useful. In contrast, Michael Raynor's new book is well written, insightful and useful. It is particularly useful for companies in industries that have high degrees of uncertainty.

Perhaps most importantly, unlike many books on strategy, it will cause management teams to rethink how they develop and manage strategy.

The Author
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Michael Raynor's last book, The Innovator's Solution is the best of the three books on disruptive strategy that have been authored by the lead author, Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christiensen.

The Subject
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Raynor's strategy paradox is that companies that execute strategies may, by virtue of their commitment to their strategy, experience strategic failure. The example of Sony with Betamax and disc players is used illustrate new insights into these familiar cases of product failure.

This core idea is a fascinating extension to the core idea in The Innovator's Solution where Christiensen and Raynor argue the well managed companies will often overlook disruptive strategies being pursued by new companies with initially inferior products. The different business models required for the successful and emerging disruptive strategy may not be manageable by the same team.

Raynor's book addresses the issue of how should companies avoid overconfidence in their ability to develop strategies and implement in an uncertain environment. In brief, his prescription is to (1) explicitly manage the commitments to a strategy and (2) simultaneously manage the uncertainty around the strategy. The consequences of his prescription are important because they affect how organizations should view the role of executive and operating management.

His prescriptions for portfolio management are based indirectly upon options theory, and illustrated by examples from Sony, Vivendi, Johnson