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.

Based on three decades of research, Strategy Rules offers a masterclass in high-stakes strategy:

• Platform and Ecosystem Strategy: Learn why Gates, Grove, and Jobs focused on building industry-spanning platforms―not just products―and how this approach created decades of market dominance for Microsoft, Intel, and Apple.
• Judo and Sumo Tactics: Discover the tactical playbook of these tech giants, from using an opponent’s strength against them to deploying overwhelming market power to secure a win.
• Big Bets Without Betting the Company: Understand how these leaders made courageous, game-changing moves while meticulously managing risk to avoid catastrophic failure.
• Leadership and Execution: Go inside the minds of three legendary CEOs to see how they shaped their organizations, paid selective attention to detail, and translated visionary ideas into ruthless execution.
• Five Actionable Rules: Distilled from thirty years of research at Harvard and MIT, this book codifies the five core principles these titans used to build their empires, offering a framework you can apply to your own business.

David B. Yoffie is the Max and Doris Starr Professor of International Business Administration at Harvard Business School.  One of Intel’s longest-serving board members from 1989 to 2018, he has served on numerous high tech boards. Yoffie has written more than 200 case studies, which sold more than 4 million copies. He is the author or co-author of ten books, and has written extensively for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Michael A. Cusumano is the SMR Distinguished Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has been a dean and vice president at Tokyo University of Science and has published over 130 articles and 13 books, including Competing on Internet Time and Strategy Rules (both with David Yoffie), Platform Leadership (with Annabelle Gawer), as well as Microsoft Secrets (with Richard Selby), The Business of Software, and Staying Power.  He lives in Groton and Cambridge, Massachusetts.