In a recent Linkedin article, I wrote about how we tend to underappreciate the importance of strategy relative to hard work or intelligence in understanding why some people succeed and others fail in any given professional, academic, or personal endeavor. I also suggested that my experience as a business strategy consultant has helped me realize that there are powerful principles of strategy development used by businesses that students could borrow to improve their academic performance. The idea that you can perform well in school by
In that article, I introduced three particularly important elements of business strategy development.
- The strategy development process – or, the process companies use to come up with ideas for what to do or not to do to beat the competition.
- The concept of market attractiveness vs. competitive position, which explains whether a company is likely to succeed (or fail) because it operates in a good market (or a bad one), is doing something better than its direct competitors, or some combination
- The notion of key success factors vs. core competencies, which helps explains why a company is positioned well in any given market (or not)
In this article, I’ll explore point 1 above, how an understanding of the strategy development process could help students improve their performance in any given class.
Over the past few years I’ve been doing a lot of reading, and a fair amount of writing on this blog, around what truly drives academic performance. One of my favorite (and most important) insights has been that IQ, or natural intelligence, is far less important than people assume it to be. This article considers that insight from a different angle, and introduces an interesting new book about how it may be possible to improve your IQ through targeted training. 