Why Are There So Many Bad Strategies?

There are mainly three reasons:

1. Making choices is a painful process
   • When DEC made strategic choices, there were three factions: "Boxes," "Chips," and "Solution." The voting led to Condorcet’s paradox. The voting paradox: democratic voting can yield irrational results like A > B > C > A. CEO Ken Olsen sought consensus, but fundamentally, you cannot make a sub-organization automatically give up its own enthusiasm. So in the end, everyone chose a compromise solution: "DEC is committed to providing high-quality products and services and being a leader in data processing." This is just empty rhetoric.
   • When Eisenhower campaigned for president in 1952, he promised to withdraw the Soviet Union from Eastern Europe, but after winning the election and conducting extensive research, he made the difficult decision to abandon that promise.
   • Intel CEO Andy Grove shifted the company from producing dynamic random access memory (DRAM) to focusing on microprocessors.
2. People prefer to use templates without thinking
   • Max Weber, the father of sociology, believed in distinguishing formal leaders from those who lead by personal charisma.
   • Peter Drucker, one of the foremost thinkers about management, said, "Effective leadership doesn’t depend on charisma. Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, and Harry Truman were singularly effective leaders, yet none possessed any more charisma than a dead mackerel.… Charisma does not by itself guarantee effectiveness as a leader."
   • The academic requirements for leadership generally are:
     1. Develops or has a vision
     2. Inspires people to sacrifice (change) for the good of the organization
     3. Empowers people to accomplish the vision
   • Leadership and strategy have commonalities, but they must not be confused. For example:
     • Leadership encourages self-sacrifice and personal transformation while feeling good about it.
     • Strategy is about articulating what kind of transformation is worth pursuing.
   • A similar confusion arises when having a strategy is mistaken for having a good strategy. Countless books and tutorials provide templates for people to fill in mindlessly, resulting in numerous bad strategies.
3. New Thought: People often believe that human will can overcome all, thinking that attitude determines everything
   • Zhang Defen's "Law of Attraction," the New Thought movement, and the fantasy of "positive energy" regarding outcomes lead people to neglect the real efforts that contribute to results, serving as a form of spiritual opium. We should focus more on imagining the process of doing things, which is akin to simulation training.