(I cannot register an account nor find the email address of the owner of this blog. The only way I can communicate is using a trackback!)

If you had the opportunity to sit down and read all 2000+ pages of the transcripts from the Good to Great interviews, you’d be struck by the utter absence of talk about “competitive strategy.” Yes, they did talk about strategy, and they did talk about performance; they did talk about becoming the best, and they even talked about winning. But they never talked in reactionary terms and never defined their strategies principally in response to what others were doing. They talked in terms of what they were trying to create, and how they were trying to improve relative to an absolute standard of excellence.

Ironically it was an email with this quote as the anchor of my argument that put a rift between me and the PMs on my last team at a large company and eventually soured me enough to leave.