Perspectives

The official history of The Sports Authority credits one man with a vision. That version is wrong, the tidy story we reach for because it is easier to tell than the truth. Its founding merchant, Roy Cohen, kept the real one, and it is the better lesson in how strategy actually emerges. The chain that became the first sporting goods retailer to pass a billion dollars in sales was built far less from a plan than from judgment. “to Roy, who knows the real story.” — inscribed on

Prologue [I come to strategy from a few directions. Thirty years in product, strategy, and organizational design, collaborating with organizations large and small. And a lifelong obsession with music theory, composition, and jazz. Whilst they may seem like separate threads, I see an eternal golden braid .] Good strategy like good jazz share similar fundamental challenges. Both deal with creating coherent action over time in the presence of uncertainty. Both require balancing

The room was silent except for the sound of sketching. Twenty-seven executives from a Fortune 100 company, faced with an industry disruption that would eliminate half their revenue within three years, were drawing their way through a crisis they couldn't analyze their way out of. No PowerPoints. No SWOT analyses. No McKinsey 2x2 matrices or Gartner reports. Just paper, pens, and the uncomfortable truth that their entire strategic planning apparatus had failed. Five-year plans

There is a moment in every new product design when everything changes. Not the moment when the final prototype ships. Not when the user testing validates your riskiest assumptions about how something might be interpreted and used. Not even when the board approves funding based on your compelling demo. No. It's the moment when someone who wasn't in the room looks at your wireframe and understands. Someone who missed the late-night debates. Who never saw Post-its covering every