“A good business strategy deals with the edge between the known and the unknown. It is competition with others that pushes us to edges of knowledge. Only there are found the opportunities to keep us ahead of rivals. There is no avoiding it. The uneasy sense of ambiguity you feel [when developing strategy] is real. It is the scent of opportunity … Given that we are working on the edge, asking for a strategy that is guaranteed to work is like asking a scientist for a hypothesis that is guaranteed to be true. It is a dumb request … A good strategy, in the end, is a hypothesis about what will work.

In a world of change and flux, doing more of the same is rarely the right answer. In a changing world, good strategy must embody some ideas or insights into new combinations of resources for dealing with new risks and opportunities. The problem with dealing with strategy as a crank-winding exercise is that systems of deduction and computation do not produce new, interesting ideas, no matter how hard one winds the crank … stating a new theorem is a profoundly creative act.”

Richard Rumelt, strategy expert