Richard Rumelt: Most

Richard Rumelt is American economist. Explore interesting quotes on most.

Richard Rumelt: 50 quotes0 likes

“For Schumpeter the most important firms are those that serve as the vehicles for action of the real drivers of the system — the innovating entrepreneurs.”

Source: "Towards a strategic theory of the firm." 1997, p. 134

“The enhanced ability to obtain external funding and … capacity to deploy capital internally to the most promising of a wide range of divisional ventures.”

Source: Strategy, structure, and economic performance. (1974), p. 119

“Back in the mid-1990s I was researching strategy in the global electronics industry. I interviewed 20 to 30 executives, CEOs, and division managers and asked fairly simple questions. Which company was the leader in their market? How did that company become the leader? What’s their own company’s strategy?
I saw an interesting pattern. Most executives easily explained how companies became market leaders: Some sort of window of opportunity opened, and the leader was the company that was the first to successfully jump through that window. Not exactly the first mover but the first to get it right.
But when I asked these same executives about their own strategies, I heard a lot about doorknob polishing. They were doing 360-degree feedback, forming alliances, outsourcing, cutting costs, and so on. None of them even mentioned taking a good position quickly when the industry changes.”

About strategy starts with identifying changes, and companies taking position (1)
"McKinsey Quarterly interview," 2007

“A leader’s most important job is creating and constantly adjusting this strategic bridge between goals and objectives.”

Source: Good Strategy Bad Strategy, 2011, p. 52

“This study partitions the total variance in rate of return among FTC Line of Business reporting units into industry factors (whatever their nature), time factors, factors associated with the corporate parent, and business-specific factors. Whereas Schmalensee (1985) reported that industry factors were the strongest, corporate and market share effects being extremely weak, this study distinguishes between stable and fluctuating effects and reaches markedly different conclusions. The data reveal negligible corporate effects, small stable industry effects, and very large stable business-unit effects. These results imply that the most important sources of economic rents are business-specific; industry membership is a much less important source and corporate parentage is quite unimportant.”

Source: "How Much Does Industry Matter?", 1991, p. 167; Abstract

“Having conflicting goals, dedicating resources to unconnected targets, and accommodating incompatible interests are the luxuries of the rich and powerful, but they make for bad strategy. Despite this, most organizations will not create focused strategies. Instead, they will generate laundry lists of desirable outcomes and, at the same time, ignore the need for genuine competence in coordinating and focusing their resources. Good strategy requires leaders who are willing and able to say no to a wide variety of actions and interests. Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does.”

Source: Good Strategy Bad Strategy, 2011, p. 20