I believe that you have to understand the microeconomics of a business before you have a strategy, and you have to understand your strategy before you have a structure. If you get these in the wrong order, you will probably fail.

Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different. The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Operational effectiveness is about things that you really shouldn’t have to make choices on; it’s about what’s good for everybody and about what every business should be doing.”

From a corporate perspective, the best measure of fitness is return on invested capital (ROIC). This measure matters most because over the long haul, capital flows toward investment opportunities with a high ROIC. Inefficient companies, on the other hand, are eventually starved of the cash they need to survive. To understand just how indispensable technology has become, you have to follow the basic math of return on invested capital. To get ROIC, you divide EBIT, or earnings before interest and taxes, by invested capital. Now let’s divide the numerator and the denominator by annual sales. This restates ROIC as operating margin multiplied by asset turnover. In other words, the two components that define a company’s fitness are the ability to charge a high spread between price and actual cost, and the ability to generate sales from a small base of invested capital.

Percentage margins are not one of the things we are seeking to optimize. It’s the absolute dollar free cash flow per share that you want to maximize, and if you can do that by lowering margins, we would do that. So if you could take the free cash flow, that’s something that investors can spend. Investors can’t spend percentage margins.vWhat matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that. When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we’ll take the cash flows. With free cash flow what counts is when the money actually changes hands. So if you have a business where your customers pay you quickly, you manage your inventory well, and you’re able to take your time in paying your suppliers, your free cash flow can be consistently positive even when your net income is not.

You have to understand what it is that you are better at than anybody else and mercilessly focus your efforts on it.