Your Strategy Is Not What You Say It Is

Or, where you allocate your resources says a lot about you

Through most of the 1990s, after Steve Jobs had been forced out, Apple’s ability to deliver the fantastic products it had become renowned for simply stopped.

Without Jobs’s discipline at the company, a big gap began to emerge between Apple’s intended strategy and its actual one — and Apple began to flounder.
For example, Apple’s attempt to create a next-generation operating system to compete with Microsoft’s Windows during the mid-nineties — codenamed Copland — slipped numerous times.

Though it was claimed to be a priority for the company, Apple just couldn’t seem to deliver it. Management kept telling everyone — press, employees, and shareholders — how important it was, but nothing moved.

Within the company, there was no cohesion between what senior management was promising to the market and what was actually prioritised within teams. For example, engineers were assigned to work on other projects, solve existing issues, or dream up new ideas that had nothing to do with Copland.

Without Jobs, teams were able to get away with spending their time on ideas they were excited about, regardless of whether they matched the company’s goals.

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Πηγή: coffeeandjunk.substack.com