According to Coyne and SubramaniamThe McKinsey Quarterly, 1996, Number 4, a strategy is the handful of decisions that:

• drives or shapes your subsequent actions over a planning horizon (typically multi-year)
• are not easily changed once made, and
• will have the greatest impact at this point in time on your long-term success

This handful of decisions includes:

• selecting your strategic posture with respect to your customers for the products and services which you intend to offer them
• identifying the value propositions which you will pursue with those customers through a coherent concept of operations
• developing approaches to create or align projects with these sources of value
• constructing tailored delivery systems to realize benefits from these projects as soon and broadly as possible

In synthesizing these strategies over time, customer-driven value should be pursued by extending: Read more »

Microsoft gets over 100,000 suggestions each year from their users for changes to their Office suite. Approximately 75% of these requests are for features that are already in their products - a revelation that led to the latest version, Office 2007, implementing significant changes to the user interface.

Five hundred million people use Office world-wide, yet estimates from various sources scope the size of the development team at between 500 and 1000 people. Thus, with as many as a million licenses in the marketplace for each member of the team, the revenue per developer which Microsoft receives for this product is substantial, and their collective efforts are clearly one of the highest value-producing ventures in business today. Read more »