The link between decision making and business is inseparable. Decisions ranging from the smallest to the biggest are made mostly based on data these days. Let’s explore a few everyday examples before we look at the giants in the business world.

Decisions such as sending your child to school/college or finding a good restaurant to dine out with friends or family are all decided based on data collected from external sources (yes, in good old days before Covid-19 😊). Sure, you had your preferences like location, budget, etc. to think about, but data in the form of reviews from Google, Facebook, and Apps factored in too. You have an important meeting to get to, so you want to arrive at the destination at least a few minutes earlier than the schedule. You instinctively pull out the phone and launch Google Maps to see which route has the least amount of traffic and saves you maximum time before you step out of your house. Data-driven decision making is so much a part of our behavior that we don’t realize how big a role it plays in our life — it’s the invisible elephant in the room.

That exciting shortcut route that you discovered or suggested by the maps app that promised to save 10 mins of your commute time turned out to be a narrow road filled with potholes that added 10 minutes to your travel time than reduce it! The restaurant where you expected delicious food and a good ambiance to enjoy a quality evening with your family or friends turned out to be a crowded place with delayed serving! In our personal lives, unwanted, unexpected, or unpleasant situations based on incomplete or bad data can be easily ignored or forgiven in the grand scheme of things in our life. But things are a lot different when data-oriented decisions backfire in the world of business. And we have plenty of examples of it.

When Data Served Businesses No Good

It’s hard to believe that Warren Buffett, revered as the “The Oracle from Omaha”, did not seize the opportunity and invest big in companies such as Google and Walmart. It is said that Buffett was skeptical about investing large amounts in tech-based organizations but had to eat the humble pie when technology overtook every nook and cranny of our world. He lost out on making a killing in the market with Google, but he learned from his mistake and invested heavily in Apple and IBM. Lack of data of the explosive heights Google reached was perhaps the biggest cause here. Without past performance data, Buffett had no idea of just how big such companies would get.

While a lack of data can make us err on the side of caution, it’s not as painful and annoying as making a bad decision based on falsified data. Not to mention, the huge losses that businesses suffer sometimes lead them to bankruptcy and a large number of people becoming unemployed. The perfect example of this is the Daiichi-Ranbaxy deal fiasco of 2008. The Singh brothers, Malvinder and Shivinder Singh had inherited the larger than life pharma company — Ranbaxy Laboratories from their father. All data at the time the sale was made pointed to a healthy, multi-billion dollar company. The financial service group that acted on their behalf — Religare Finvest, supported by a deal of such a large amount ($4.6B), blindly trusted the brothers and advanced them large sums of cash to expand their other business — the Fortis Healthcare chain of hospitals. Turns out, the brothers used the money to clear the debts of all their companies, probably in an attempt to save their large value deal with Daiichi Sankyo and ended up defaulting on their repayments to Religare. In the end, despite overwhelming amounts of data indicating the Singh brothers could be the most valuable persons of their client to Religare turned out to be their worst nightmare.

It’s Not All About the Data

There are thousands of other such examples in the business world that can leave management executives wondering where slogans like Big Data, Data Mining, and Data Analytics are even worth the investments they demand? The answer is yes; data-driven decision making will always be a part of the business. What is needed is a healthy dose of common sense and business acumen to decide to what extent should we rely on the data that we gather. Businesses need to learn to trust the data but verify and blend data interpretation with other important processes such as:

• Ensuring data is collected only from reliable sources
• Running the decisions based on data sets with multiple, trained people, such as SMEs and data scientists, before acting on those decisions
• Realize that data alone cannot be held accountable for the failure of losses of an organization. Although data helps with the decision-making process, it is ultimately an individual or group of individuals who make the decision. They should learn to take responsibility when they must
• Gather data from a large pool of sources, provided you have an adequate number of resources to sift through data silos in the best possible manner

The Secret Ingredient for the Perfect Soup

Over-relying on data can in fact make a good thing turn bad, as you can see in the case of WeWork and Softbank. WeWork, once valued at nearly $50B, today has a valuation of a mere $2.9B, thanks to several factors. This means bad news for the hundreds of workers who have been laid off at the WeWork side, as well as several thousand investors who handed their money over to SoftBank funds.

Data is the key element in today’s business world and the basic building blocks of all products, services, and customer interactions. Data when combined with business knowledge, foresight, and high emotional intelligence can make for that perfect drink. Just like the perfect soup, it is important to blend the right amount of each factor to create the perfect business strategy or decision. Data in business cannot be eliminated, but its importance can be elevated if used in the right manner, combined with other necessary business strategies.

Your decisions are as good as your data

References:

1. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/warren-buffett-biggest-regret-not-investing-in-this-technology-giant/articleshow/58551975.cms?from=mdr
2. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-50010728
3. https://www.theweek.in/news/biz-tech/2019/04/06/Ranbaxy-rumble-How-the-once-mighty-business-siblings-face-threat-of-jail-term.html
4. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/18/softbank-ceo-calls-wework-investment-foolish-valuation-falls-to-2point9-billion.html

Being born in an agricultural family near Bangalore and watching urbanization in recent decades swallowing the agricultural lands around big cities in India, I thought of writing down my observations of this changing landscape of Agricultural Economy in India.

One of the earliest lessons in economics and trade that we learn in school is that India’s economy is largely driven by agriculture and its related industries. Looking at some of the numbers from reliable sources, it is evident that despite concepts like ‘Digital India’, India remains one of those countries that are heavily dependent on the performance of its agricultural sector. It is, in fact, one of the few countries which still has a successful dual economy model being followed, with one part dedicated to income from agricultural products (which largely form the rural economy) and the other part dedicated to the manufacturing and services sectors (which predominantly make up the urban economy).

Despite having a rural economy for centuries, India is yet to find an effective way in which it can reduce the disparity between the rural and urban economies. To explain one of the biggest factors of the disparity in simple terms, you just need to look at the number of people who have migrated from rural regions to Tier I and Tier-II cities. While some of them aspire to leave behind the trouble associated with agricultural income and work hard to enter a completely different income sector, a large number of migrant workers still find it difficult to find reasonably good jobs and end up as laborers or unskilled workers doing odd jobs. But if you were to ask people of either category, they would tell you that for them, the biggest difference is the source of their revenue; as long as it’s not directly related to farming, they are okay to toil on any other opportunity that they get.

Let us look at some of the statistics on Rural India’s Economy Outlook. An in-depth report curated by the NITI Aayog on this topic, by Ramesh Chand, S. K Srivastava, and Jaspal Singh, have plenty of numbers for readers to understand the changes the agriculture sector has witnessed in the last 4 decades. But here are some of the key ones:

1. As of 2017, 46% of the nation’s income was derived from the rural economy
2. As of 2011, 72.4% of the nation’s entire workforce belonged to rural regions, and their share of the population was 68.8%. However, the more significant fact is that the country’s urban population witnessed a growth of 31.8% in the decade leading up to 2011, whereas the rural population only increased by 12.8%
3. The rural area’s contribution to the national economy between 1970–71 was 62.4% and fell steeply to just 46.9% in 2011–12. The drop in the workforce, however, was disproportionate — it fell from 84.1% to 70.9% in those periods. This indicates that although many people were available in the rural regions for employment, they did not have adequate resources or platforms to contribute to the net domestic product (NDP)
4. Agriculture has remained the topper in terms of rural employment from 1970 to 2012. It accounted for 96.8% of the total rural workforce between 1970–71 and stood at 95.9% as of 2011–12.
5. There was a brief pause in the agriculture growth rate in the decade between 1994–2005. In the decade before that, the growth rate stood at 2.57%, then fell to 1.87%, and then sharply rose to 4.27% in the decade after that. The employment rate, however, witnessed a steady fall across the decades — 1.72% to 0.74% to 02.04%.
6. One of the key achievements of the Central Government is that the nation’s overall unemployment rate fell to 4.8% as of February of 2017 whereas it stood at 9.6% just 6 months before that. One of the key reasons was its focus on increasing the number of rural jobs under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).

Entrepreneurial Options for Farmers Today

Recently, Mr. Anand Mahindra, Chairman of the Mahindra Group, had a short series of tweets dedicated to the achievements of NAANDI India — an organization that is dedicated to improving the quality of life for girls, the youth, and farmers of India. Mahindra, who is a chairperson of NAANDI too, explains how the organization created a ‘proof-of-concept’ to create a self-sustaining rural India that is also catering to the needs of the urban population during the Covid-19 pandemic. Here’s the outline:

• A nodal group called the ‘UrbanFarmaCo’ has taken the lead on an initiative that aims to make all their associated farmers with an entrepreneurial spirit to be self-reliant and supply completely organic, healthy produce at steady rates. The group and its clusters of farmers manage the seeds, tools, machines, and all other forms of inputs themselves
• The group uses innovative technologies such as converting biomass into aid for farming activities and infuse microbes that enhance the quality of the soil, making it more fertilized.
• The produce from the cluster farmers is collected by the group at the center, who oversees inspecting, grading, and packaging them using high hygiene standards. So far, they have been supplying this highly nutritious produce to residents in Delhi
• This business model has achieved farmer-level profitability (i.e. each farmer is profitable) and is on track to become profitable on a business model level
• Even during these challenging times, they have managed to supply 25 types of fresh produce

The focus is not just on how farmers can earn money, but also on ways in which they can use modern concepts such as AI and AgriTech in their business model. Farmers these days have helped by not just from the government but from technologies that help them understand the best way to keep their soil fertilized, how to alternate the crops based on changing seasons to ensure they remain profitable throughout the year, how to properly store their produce or even venture into options such as canned foods and pickling and using digital modes of payment for faster transactions and quicker returns.

Some of the more recent concepts that have come to light as:

1. Farming as a Service — FaaS in which a larger number of companies are eager to offer renting and leasing services, for example, to reduce the burden on farmers to outright buy expensive machinery and instead invest in better seeds and fertilizers
2. Government Intervention — The government is taking a keen interest in advising farmers on eliminating farming incorrectly and concerns related to inflation, and playing a role in deciding a price on their produce to ensure they remain profitable
3. Big Data in Agriculture — Diagnostics and data analysis of soil quality to improve its quality to ensure better crops are grown has been a huge bonus to farmers so they have the right combination of NPK — Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium.

Opportunities for farmers owning barren lands

According to the ISRO’s remotely sensed data, India has 96.40 million hectares or 29.32% of degraded land or barren land not suitable for cultivation. The degradation of desertification happens for various reasons such as drought, flooding, topsoil erosion, over-grazing, etc. Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar said that India will aim to transform 5 million hectares of degraded land for cultivation by 2030. The Government is planning to converge various land and water schemes to arrest desertification and reclaim degraded land for cultivation.

As the nation hopes to cut carbon footprint and quicken clean energy generation, the Union Finance minister Nirmala Seetharaman during her 2020 Union Budget speech said that India will increase solar power generation by promoting the installation of solar panels on barren lands. The scheme allows farmers to set up solar power generation capacity on their barren lands and send it to the grid and generate income for farmers.

Some other options that farmers can earn from their barren lands are agriculture warehouses, cold storage, and inventory storage of food grains or other produce.

“The only constant in life is change”-Heraclitus, a Greek Philospher

While the world is undergoing the Covid-19 crisis and is filled with uncertainties in all spectrums of life, there is only so much that we can do apart from staying safe, helping the needy, praying for those affected and hoping for the best. Like everything in life, this too shall pass.

With close to 2 years of immersive experience in Product Leadership as part of Executive MBA at Institute of Product Leadership and experimenting with Scholarship Aggregator (Yojana) platform as part of the much-acclaimed Product Labs track of the institute, I thought of sharing my views through this article on the benefits of studying on a scholarship in India.

As a democracy with a diverse population and a complex social structure, a lot of equitable access to quality education depends on scholarships. It comes as no surprise when the cumulative sum of scholarships in India for Indian students reaches astounding figures of thousands of crores.

Given the current economic scenario, the condition of the banking sector and the acute competition for employment and government grants, scholarships have re-emerged as a battleground of competition for students. The need for sustenance of scholarships also highlighted by a recent report published by the Institute for Policy Research Studies (PRS, New Delhi), wherein the dropout rate of the student is shown to be significantly high i.e. 10th standard enrollment of 77% reducing to an enrollment of 52% by 11th Standard.

Why Opt for Scholarships?

Getting education through a scholarship has the following benefits:

1. Financial Support: Qualifying a scholarship can enable you to seek complete or partial financial assistance for your education. There is a significant possibility that you become financially independent and don’t get to spend a single rupee on your education.

2. Special Recognition: Few students end up in the merit list. Fewer ends up in the scholarship list. Even though the selection may be difficult, many students are not aware of scholarships and it opens up countless possibilities for you. Once you secure a scholarship, you are better than being a meritorious student because the granting body has recognized your struggles, your strength of character along with your performance and your potential.

3. Global Recognition: Not all colleges and degrees have global recognition, but thanks to the listing of education in the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN, scholarships are given a second look and students with scholarships have the upper hand in seeking dialogue with institutes abroad.

4. Criteria for further Scholarships: Most scholarships intend to support fresh candidates but certain scholarships in sciences and sports grant additional scholarships to scholarship holders.

5. Social Support: If you are from an underprivileged section of society or meritorious student, society recognizes your achievement as a scholarship student and tries to support your progress.

Types of Scholarships:

Scholarships can be categorized on the various criteria namely:

1. Type of organization that runs the scholarship program i.e. Union Government, State Government, NGO or CSR division of a Private Entity.

2. Nature of the qualification criteria of the scholarship i.e. Merit-Based, Means based, merit-cum-means based, based on gender or socio-ethnic background of the applicant or even based on recovery and rehabilitation from natural disasters.

3. Nature of the pursued education i.e. academic degree or research, skill certification or apprenticeship.

The prevalence of Scholarships in India is well reflected in the fact that:

1. Union Government programs comprise of scholarships from 6 Ministries, 3 Departments and 2 Statutory Bodies ( Statutory Bodies are organizations that are created by an Act of Parliament). Currently, 30 Scholarships of the Union Government have a digital footprint.

2. Collectively, 10 State Governments of India provide online information to 140+ scholarships and the remaining 19 States are presumed to have another 100 scholarships for their residents.

3. Currently, few online information aggregators and Start-ups (like WeMakeScholars & Buddy4Study) have emerged as reliable resources for the domain of scholarships. They provide users with credible information for 400+ scholarships, including Government-funded and non-government scholarships and valuable insights that can help you understand the online information which has been published by various Governments under the Digital India initiative.

So, why Students are not Securing Scholarships?

1. Lack of Awareness: Students tend to follow a few scholarships rather than discover the ones that could be most relevant to their needs. Come to think of it, how many scholarships are you aware of right now, let alone the scholarships that may find you eligible? How do you distinguish a merit-based scholarship from its subsets of talent-based and sports scholarships? The fact is, many applicants follow the crowd to last-minute applications to prestigious scholarships while funds in many other scholarships remain unused.

2. Lack of Guidance: There are countless counselors and resources for academic and career guidance but very few dedicated avenues to seek reliable guidance on scholarships. Even renowned names such as Buddy4study have merely helped 75k students through access to scholarships worth Rs. 65 crores. Although a tremendous achievement, the number seems trivial in front of millions of applications for higher education and a much higher number of enrolments in elementary schools, high schools, and open schools. Wemakescholars have a comprehensive list of 403+ scholarships with adequate information and guidance tools for students, a massive user base of lakhs of students and yet the engagement with students has tremendous scope when it comes to the national potential for the same.

3. Lack of Planning: Similar to entrance examinations and competitions, many scholarships require a planned approach over a year or two. While means based scholarships require financial planning, merit-based scholarships require planning towards the careful selection of the most relevant qualifying criteria that can set you above the crowd. It is not only about the performance, but also the platform or event where the performance has yielded credible results.

4. Lack of Preparation: Apart from preparation for qualification, students often ignore the preparation of documents for submission in scholarship applications. Documentary preparation is an absolute must and many online resources help provide the necessary guidance to get your application right. Avoid the mistakes and unforced errors that can make you ineligible or make your application unworthy of a scholarship. Buddy4 Study provides ample information for preparation when it comes to 25 merit-based, 25 means based, 25 merit cum means based, 15 Talent based, 6 sports-based, 26 for women, 25 for overseas studies.

Why is it the right time to pursue Scholarships?

There are many compelling factors for the pursuance of scholarships today, mainly:

1. More than a 15% increase in the budget of the Department for Minority Development. With the current budget of 550 crore INR, you can expect a significant increase in scholarship budget for minorities, women from minority communities and certain sections of under-privileged.

2. The Companies (Amendment) Bill of 2019 has introduced various policy parameters to make Corporate CSR funding more accountable, including scholarship programs The very same Bill has also proposed the creation of a National CSR fund for the collection of unused CSR funds which amounted to Rs. 1,717 crore in FY 2018.

3. Educational Institutions and Universities have pursued the route of scholarships to introduce new courses and skill-based programs that are more relevant to the current job market.

Conclusion

The tremendous student base needs to tap the huge allocation of scholarship funds. Many start-ups and information aggregators are quickly entering the space of “scholarship-matchmaking” and the students must capitalize on this opportunity and gain the first-mover advantage.

I finished reading Strategy Rules-Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs By David B. Yoffie and Michael A. Cusumano, Gurus on strategy and authors of some of the best selling business books (they also co-authored Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and Its Battle with Microsoft).

Despite vast differences in their personalities and leadership styles, these three industry titans and iconic CEOs who shaped today’s world in some way shared an influential approach to strategy. It is that intersection of strategy framework that the authors present in this book through five rules that other leaders and managers can benefit from. I see that this convergence of strategy amongst Steve Jobs, Andy Grove, and Bill Gates is as rare as the picture on the cover page of this book. Though there are numerous books or case studies written analyzing these individuals and their companies, this book is a unique attempt by authors to study Gates, Grove, and Jobs together side-by-side to identify commonalities in their approaches to strategy, execution, and entrepreneurship.

“Becoming a great strategist is not innate. Most successful executives learn over time how to think more strategically and how to execute more effectively, at the tactical and organizational level”

I liked how the authors have distilled the shared approach to strategy into 5 rules while exploring the journey in creating the most valuable companies in the high-tech world.

So, the five timeless lessons or strategy rules that describe the framework are:

1. Look Forward, Reason Back
2. Make Big Bets, Without Betting the Company
3. Build Platforms and Ecosystems — Not Just Products
4. Exploit Leverage and Power — Play Judo and Sumo
5. Shape the Organization Around Your Personal Anchor

In the following sections, I will attempt to summarize in brief what each of these rules means.

Rule #1: Look Forward, Reason Back

It is very natural that when we face a big decision, the instinct is to refer back to history for similar problems and draw lessons to address the situations at hand. That is looking back and reason forward.

However, what the authors observed from these three executives during their career span is looking forward and reasoning back. As a strategist, you need to be looking forward into the future (where you want the business to be in two, three, five years down the road)and then reasoning back to actions that you must take today (what priorities, boundaries you need to do today).

This process of looking forward and reasoning back is broken into four principles:

1. Look forward to develop a vision of the future; reason back to set boundaries and priorities
2. Look forward to anticipate customer needs; reason back to match capabilities
3. Look forward to anticipate competitors’ moves; reason back to build barriers to entry and lock in customers
4. Look forward to anticipate industry inflections points; reason back to commit to change and stay the course

Each of these principles is discussed in detail in the book with examples drawn from each of the three executives strategies and decisions.

“Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to document that.” — Bill Gates

Rule #2: Make Big Bets, Without Betting the Company

What made Microsoft, Intel, and Apple giants of high-tech industries are the willingness of these three executives to make big courageous bets but without putting their companies at risk of collapse. The book talks about some of the big bets which shaped or transformed these companies from small firms to giants.

Microsoft did in the early 1990s with developing GUI based operating system Windows before breaking out with IBM and before Gates felt that other lines of business were strong enough to keep the company afloat.

Apple did in 2005 with Steve Job’s decision to replace Mac’s PowerPC (from IBM) chip with Intel chip that gave Apple a new lease of life.

Intel with its big bet in 1985 on going alone with 80386 processor as sole producer and turning to Compaq when IBM came up with their own processor (PowerPC).

These decisions are manifested in four principles:

1. Bet bog to change the game
2. Don’t bet the company
3. Cannibalize your own business
4. Cut your losses

“We learned that high market share was critical for success, and that to get market share we had to be willing to invest in manufacturing capacity. Such investments involve big bets because they have to be made in advance of actual demand.” — Andy Grove

Rule #3: Build Platforms and Ecosystems — Not Just Products

The book talks about how these three executives set the foundations for platform strategy and how that differs from product strategy.

Building a competitive advantage that can last of years often requires influencing the world beyond the boundaries of a single firm. When you build an industry-wide platform that creates a broad ecosystem of complementary services or products, it creates exponential growth for the company. This is very much evident in Intel, Microsoft, and Apple’s growth stories.

For example, Gates states very clearly that he knew from day one when Microsoft structured its deal with IBM to allow Microsoft to license DOS to other companies, that there would probably be a clone industry for personal computers, just like there had been for the IBM mainframe. So he saw that the personal computer would be a platform and that Microsoft’s operating system could be a key element of that platform. Similarly with Intel’s x86 microprocessor approach and Apple’s iTunes.

So, the principles that govern the platform and ecosystem strategy are:

1. Think platforms, not just products
2. Think ecosystems, not just platforms
3. Create some of your own complements
4. Evolve and invent new platforms to avoid obsolescence

“Microsoft is the company that has worked with independent software developers more than any other company… Why did we beat other operating systems? Because we worked with independent software companies to get them to write applications.” — Bill Gates

Rule #4: Exploit Leverage and Power — Play Judo and Sumo

This explores the tactical link between thinking strategically and delivering real outcomes. Authors study these three executives on how they avoided the natural temptation to delegate day-to-day tactical decisions or work to subordinates. A great strategist turns the vision and high-level ideas into tactics, actions that reach the customer and tackle the competition. It brings up aspects like being both clever and tough at the same time.

The Judo strategy represents the cleverness — finding ways to take advantages of competitors’ strengths and turn them to your advantage or finding ways to avoid head-on struggles with your competitor when you’re not ready. For example, when Jobs was launching iTunes, Apple only had around 2% of the PC market. So he used that to his advantage in negotiating with music executives; he persuaded them to license music on Apple’s terms as an experiment. In effect, he said: I’m only 2% of the market; what have you got to lose? In that case, being underestimated helped Steve Jobs get his way. That was, in retrospect, a huge mistake by the music industry.

The Sumo strategy represents being tough enough when you’re big and powerful — not being afraid to throw your weight around. For example, Jobs bullied book publishers into accepting Apple’s terms to launch the Apple
iBookstore with the iPad. But playing sumo means walking a fine line.

All three executives employed a mix of judo and sumo techniques. Below are the three judo-inspired principles and one sumo-inspired principle:

1. Stay under the radar
2. Keep your enemies close
3. Embrace and extend competitors’ strengths
4. Don’t be afraid to throw your weight around

“We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose… The era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over, as far as I’m concerned.” — Steve Jobs

Rule #5: Shape the Organization Around Your Personal Anchor

The reason why these three CEOs were effective at the execution was their personal stake in the ground or personal anchor.

For Gates, it was his understanding of software, which was as good as anybody in the world at the time he was launching Microsoft. For Jobs, it was his unique ability to understand the average user, especially the user interface. And Andy Grove had the incredible engineering-like process discipline; it was very clear that what he tried to do was bring the discipline
of engineering to the messy business that semiconductor manufacturing was at that time. All these three executives recognized and compensated for their weaknesses through the people they hired and the cultures, systems, and values they inspired. Each was an imperfect but ultimately effective leader. They all demonstrated the essence of the following four principles:

1. Know thyself — warts and all
2. Pay extraordinary attention to details-selectively
3. Never lose sight of the big picture
4. Give power to people with “the knowledge”

“Execution is God” — Andy Grove

Conclusion

In summary, Strategy Rules By David B. Yoffie and Michael A. Cusumano is a great read. The best part is that you get to understand these three iconic CEOs’ strategy approaches while comparing their decisions side-by-side yet seeing them individually. The way authors identified the patterns and strategic framework studying these three distinct personalities is the uniqueness of this book.

If you are curious to learn about these great strategists of our time, their journey to the greatness, how they played their strengths and compensated for their weaknesses then this book gives a great insight into those aspects. I enjoyed reading it and would definitely recommend this to anyone interested in learning strategy and what makes a great strategist.