Hamilton Helmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think you call it the take-off phase in the market. Take-off phase, yes. If you think of a founder, there's this period where there's tremendous flux going on. They don't know who the customers are, technologies can change like crazy. They all have a wide variety, different types of competitors. In that, there are all kinds of degrees of freedom about how you move. The fact that people even talk about pivoting is just suggesting that it is possible (in fact) to pivot. Ask Intel to pivot and it won't happen very easily, even if it's certainly been trying for a long time. What that says is, there's this moment, but then the problem is, from a strategist point of view is that all the information is changing so radically that the person or the group that has to process that is the founder and his team. It's not hiring somebody like me and making a recommendation, or a strategic planning, or something like that. It's actually processing all this time. As you move through space and time, understanding, okay, this direction looks a little better than that direction. What that said to me was that what people needed was not advice from an expert, but rather teaching to fish. Trying to assemble a way of looking at strategy so that the people on the ground who are really making these decisions have a way of thinking about it that it's never perfect, but guide them in the right direction. The problem in doing that for me was providing a mental model like that. As I say, in the book, it has to be simple but not simplistic as simple so that you can retain it, not simplistic so that it's relatively complete, you don't miss a lot. That's a really high bar in strategy. That's what took me so long. I wrote the book. It took me 20 years of writing it. Hamilton, I'll tell you, having read a bunch of business books and having an even larger pile of business books I've bought but haven't read, there's so many different mental models. Thank you for taking the 20 years to do it because the fact that there is a one-page reference card that assembles this whole thing in grid, it actually does make it so you can reference the Seven Powers and make decisions in real time. It's certainly much more accessible than trying to weave your own fabric of lots of different theories.…

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