Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs

The authors of the bestselling Competing on Internet Time (a Business Week top 10 book) analyze the strategies, principles, and skills of three of the most successful and influential figures in business – Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs – offering lessons for all managers and entrepreneurs on leadership, strategy and execution. In less than a decade, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Andy Grove founded three companies that would define the world of technology and transform our lives. At their peaks, Microsoft, Apple, and Intel were collectively worth some $1.5 trillion. Strategy Rules examines these three individuals collectively for the first time – their successes and failures, commonalities and differences – revealing the business strategies and practices they pioneered while building their firms. David B. Yoffie and Michael A. Cusumano have studied these three leaders and their companies for more than thirty years, while teaching business strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship at Harvard and MIT. In this enlightening guide, they show how Gates, Grove, and Jobs approached strategy and execution in remarkably similar ways – yet markedly differently from their erstwhile competitors – keeping their focus on five strategic rules. Strategy Rules brings together the best practices in strategic management and high-tech entrepreneurship from three path-breaking entrepreneurs who emerged as CEOs of huge global companies. Their approaches to formulating strategy and building organizations offer unique insights for start-up executives as well as the heads of modern multinationals.

Speaker Details

Michael A. Cusumano is the Sloan Management Review Distinguished Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, with a joint appointment in MIT’s Engineering Systems Division. His research focuses on technology management and strategy, especially in the software business. He received an undergraduate degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in production and operations management at the Harvard Business School. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and a Japan Foundation Fellow at the University of Tokyo. In 2009, he delivered the 13th annual Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies at Oxford University and was named one of the most influential people in technology and IT by Silicon.com. Professor Cusumano is a director of a leading Indian IT services company, Patni Computer Systems (NYSE: PTI, www.patni.com), and of an interactive voice communications provider, Eliza Corporation (www.elizacorporation.com). He is also an advisor to FixStars Corp. (www.fixstars.com), which builds high-performance computing applications for clusters of Sony Playstation consoles and other multi-core processor blade servers; and Buzzient (www.buzzient.com), a social media analytics and integration firm. He is the author or co-author of 8 books, including The Business of Software (2004), Platform Leadership (2002), Competing on Internet Time (1998), and Microsoft Secrets (1995).

Date:
Speakers:
Michael Cusumano
Affiliation:
MIT Slowan School of Management
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