Many business leaders subscribe to the classic definition of strategy as a set of actions designed to achieve an overall aim. In other words, they believe strategy starts with a goal. But for companies that have implemented winning strategies, that’s not how it typically happens.Take Microsoft: Looking back, it may seem that Bill Gates followed a straight path from a goal to dominate the software market for personal computers to building a company now worth more than US$300 billion. But Gates didn’t start with that goal — it came much later, after Microsoft was already well on its way to becoming a global powerhouse. First, there was Traf-O-Data, a business Gates and Paul Allen started in the early 1970s. It was based on a software program they wrote for Intel’s 8008 microprocessor to analyze information collected by traffic monitors on city streets. After this went nowhere, Gates and Allen wrote a BASIC operating system for the Altair 8800, the first microcomputer produced for retail sale. Gates wanted to sell the rights to this program to MITS, the Altair’s maker.
What happened next changed everything. Much to Gates’s initial anger (which caused him to write an open letter that he later recanted), microcomputer clubs across the country began pirating copies of his software.
