Full circle with myopia | Seth’s Blog

In 1983, an old article from the Harvard Business Review changed my life.

In 1960, Ted Levitt, a professor at HBS, wrote the most popular article in the Review’s history. Called Marketing Myopia, it described a different way of thinking about change and marketing.

I was a (very) young MBA student at Stanford and somehow got an interview for a summer job working as the assistant to Jim Levy, the CEO of Activision. At the time, they were the fastest-growing company in the history of the world.

Instead of meekly sharing my resume, I went in brandishing a copy of Levitt and HBR. I explained, with confidence, that Activision might be the Penn Central of their time, and they needed to be strategic in their approach to the market, broadening their focus away from the Atari console that accounted for what felt like 98% of their revenue.

He stood up to throw me out of his office. “Well, so much for that,” I thought.

At that moment, one of his VPs ran in with the Cashbox magazine bestseller list. Activision had 9 of the top 10 bestselling titles. The two of them ran down the hall to celebrate.

An hour later, Jim returned to his office, saw I was still sitting there, forgot why he was angry with me and offered me a summer job, one I ended up not taking. It didn’t matter, though, because I had seen the light.

I think Ted put his finger on something urgently important, and the lesson of the paper has stuck with me throughout my career.

This week, forty years in the making, Harvard published an edited version of my expansion of his idea, called strategy myopia.

I hope Ted would be pleased.

Strategy myopia is task focused. It’s based on a desire to get a guaranteed result for specified effort. It involves meetings and plans and powerpoints. Strategy myopia afflicts people who prioritize tactics over the hard work of finding a worthwhile strategy in the first place.

We can avoid it, but first we have to acknowledge it and discuss it.

[PS 40+ new podcast appearances are now live. Here’s an updated collection of them.]

October 23, 2024