CHAPTER 3
The What Strategy
Organizations typically fail to recognize that adopting a different set of decisions can dramatically transform the business model, even if all else remains unchanged. Thinking back to the physics of Archimedes’ lever, we know that relatively small exertions can produce large results. For example, consider what happened to the rental-car business model when Zipcar chose to rent by the hour instead of by the day. For Zipcar, a cascade of strategic and operational differences flowed from that choice, but it was still fundamentally in the business of renting cars to customers who needed them temporarily.
In a different industry, IBM left behind its guise of “heavy iron” hardware manufacturer in the mid-1990s and remade ...
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