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Mental Pivot #59: Obstacles and Opportunities

 
Good strategy and a 1965 ice hockey showdown, the utility of expected value, and musings on beneficial rivalries.

 
The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.―Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way

Strategy is a simple concept, but one that I often forget or just plain get wrong. Richard Rumelt’s book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, explores the subject of effective strategy in detail and contains lessons I think about regularly (see: my book notes). As Rumelt notes, “the core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.”

In my experience, many of us tend to focus on the latter part of Rumelt’s strategy equation, the coordinating and focusing actions, and less so on the initial phase, identifying the critical factors in a situation. Individuals who neglect this critical part of the strategy puzzle risk being relegated to the dustbin of bad strategy.

I encountered a wonderful example of “good strategy” while listening to the ”Bookmarks 2021” episode of the excellent CBC podcast, “Under the Influence” (a program about the business of advertising). It vividly illustrates Rumelt’s point.

In the podcast, host Terry O’Reilly recounts the story of an ice hockey game between the Montreal Junior Canadiens (the farm team to the NHL Canadiens) and the Soviet National Team in 1965.

Although hockey is the national sport of Canada, the outcome of the matchup was uncertain. The Soviets were a dominant force in hockey at the time, having won gold at the Olympics in 1964 and the 1965 world championship. Even though the game would take place in Canada, it was believed that the Junior Canadiens were outmatched by the Soviets and would face a humiliating defeat in front of their home fans.

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Πηγή: mentalpivot.substack.com