Ironically, in fact, the organizations that embody what would seem to be the best practices in strategy planning—organizations, for example, that possess great clarity of vision and that act decisively—can also be the most vulnerable to planning errors. The problem is what strategy consultant and author Michael Raynor calls the strategy paradox. In his book of the same name, Raynor illustrates the paradox by revisiting the case of Sony’s Betamax videocassette, which famously lost out to the cheaper, lower-quality VHS technology developed by Matsushita. According to conventional wisdom, Sony’s blunder was twofold: First, they focused on image quality over running time, thereby conceding VHS the advantage of being able to tape full-length movies. And second, they designed Betamax to be a standalone format, whereas VHS was “open,” meaning that multiple manufacturers could compete to make the devices, thereby driving down the price. As the video-rental market exploded, VHS gained a small but inevitable lead in market share, and this small lead then grew rapidly through a process of cumulative advantage. The more people bought VHS recorders, the more stores stocked VHS tapes, and vice versa. The result over time was near-total saturation of the market by the VHS format and a humiliating defeat for Sony.
What the conventional wisdom overlooks, however, is that Sony’s vision of the VCR wasn’t as a device for watching rented movies at all. Rather, Sony expected people to use VCRs to tape TV shows, allowing them to watch their favorite shows at their leisure. Considering the exploding popularity of digital VCRs that are now used for precisely this purpose, Sony’s view of the future wasn’t implausible at all. And if it had come to pass, the superior picture quality of Betamax might well have made up for the extra cost, while the shorter taping time may have been irrelevant. Nor was it the case that Matsushita had any better inkling than Sony how fast the video-rental market would take off—indeed, an earlier experiment in movie rentals by the Palo Alto–based firm CTI had failed dramatically. Regardless, by the time it had become clear that home movie viewing, not taping TV shows, would be the killer app of the VCR, it was too late. Sony did their best to correct course, and in fact very quickly produced a longer-playing BII version, eliminating the initial advantage held by Matsushita. But it was all to no avail. Once VHS got a sufficient market lead, the resulting network effects were impossible to overcome. Sony’s failure, in other words, was not really the strategic blunder it is often made out to be, resulting instead from a shift in consumer demand that happened far more rapidly than anyone in the industry had anticipated.
Shortly after their debacle with Betamax, Sony made another big strategic bet on recording technology — this time with their MiniDisc players. Determined not to make the same mistake twice, Sony paid careful attention to where Betamax had gone wrong, and did their best to learn the appropriate lessons. In contrast with Betamax, Sony made sure that MiniDiscs had ample capacity to record whole albums. And mindful of the importance of content distribution to the outcome of the VCR wars, they acquired their own content repository in the form of Sony Music. At the time they were introduced in the early 1990s, MiniDiscs held clear technical advantages over the then-dominant CD format. In particular, the MiniDiscs could record as well as play, and because they were smaller and more resistant to jolts they were better suited to portable devices. Recordable CDs, by contrast, required entirely new machines, which at the time were extremely expensive.
By all reasonable measures the MiniDisc should have been an outrageous success. And yet it bombed. What happened? In a nutshell, the Internet happened. The cost of memory plummeted, allowing people to store entire libraries of music on their personal computers. High-speed Internet connections allowed for peer-to-peer file sharing. Flash drive memory allowed for easy downloading to portable devices. And new websites for finding and downloading music abounded. The explosive growth of the Internet was not driven by the music business in particular, nor was Sony the only company that failed to anticipate the profound effect that the Internet would have on production, distribution, and consumption of music. Nobody did. Sony, in other words, really was doing the best that anyone could have done to learn from the past and to anticipate the future—but they got rolled anyway, by forces beyond anyone’s ability to predict or control.
Surprisingly, the company that “got it right” in the music industry was Apple, with their combination of the iPod player and their iTunes store. In retrospect, Apple’s strategy looks visionary, and analysts and consumers alike fall over themselves to pay homage to Apple’s dedication to design and quality. Yet the iPod was exactly the kind of strategic play that the lessons of Betamax, not to mention Apple’s own experience in the PC market, should have taught them would fail. The iPod was large and expensive. It was based on closed architecture that Apple refused to license, ran on proprietary software, and was actively resisted by the major content providers. Nevertheless, it was a smashing success. So in what sense was Apple’s strategy better than Sony’s? Yes, Apple had made a great product, but so had Sony. Yes, they looked ahead and did their best to see which way the technological winds were blowing, but so did Sony. And yes, once they made their choices, they stuck to them and executed brilliantly; but that’s exactly what Sony did as well. The only important difference, in Raynor’s view, was that Sony’s choices happened to be wrong while Apple’s happened to be right.
This is the strategy paradox. The main cause of strategic failure, Raynor argues, is not bad strategy, but great strategy that just happens to be wrong. Bad strategy is characterized by lack of vision, muddled leadership, and inept execution—not the stuff of success for sure, but more likely to lead to persistent mediocrity than colossal failure. Great strategy, by contrast, is marked by clarity of vision, bold leadership, and laser-focused execution. When applied to just the right set of commitments, great strategy can lead to resounding success—as it did for Apple with the iPod—but it can also lead to resounding failure. Whether great strategy succeeds or fails therefore depends entirely on whether the initial vision happens to be right or not. And that is not just difficult to know in advance, but impossible.
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