Roaring Out of Recession · Prep

The Professor's Questions

To achieve success in today's volatile economy is viewed by many as simply looking for avenues for survival. … Spurred by visions of a dismal future and haunted by intense competition, companies are rushing to cut costs across the board. At the same time there are others who view this time as opportune to break away from the pack. While others are hunkering down, these few are running forward. How do such organizations deal with the seemingly competing sets of demands of cutting back and investing in the future? What do they do to expand while others contract? What tangible and intangible assets do they leverage to create advantage?

Identify and explore the essential foundations for building competitive advantage in turbulent markets
Investigate how firms in a range of industries use creative strategies to build and sustain profitable market positions with top and bottom line growth in difficult markets
Cultivate an understanding of how these firms actually implement some of these changes to ensure success

My Answers

Q1. What are the essential foundations for competitive advantage in turbulent markets?

Short answer: the foundation is not a bigger cost cut and not a bolder bet. It is a specific combination — cut selectively through operating efficiency, invest comprehensively in markets and assets, and use the customer as the filter for both — carried by leaders whose mindset lets them do both at once.

The evidence from the 4,700-company study:

The downturn is a sorting machine. 17% of companies did not survive. Of the survivors, 80% had not regained their pre-recession growth rates three years later and 40% had not regained even their absolute sales and profit levels. 85% of pre-recession growth leaders were toppled. Only about 9% came out stronger and beat their industry by 10%+ on sales and profit growth. So "surviving" is not the bar; the bar is being in the 9%.
Pure defense loses. Prevention-focused companies — the ones that cut everything and invest in nothing more than peers — have a 21% chance of breaking away. Their post-recession sales grow 6% a year and EBITDA 4%. Among the 200 largest companies after 2000, their profits rose by $600 million on average; progressive companies' rose by $6.6 billion — eleven times more. Sony cut headcount 11%, R&D 12% and capex 23% in 2000–02; margins went from 8% to 12%, but sales growth went from 11% to 1%, and it lost e-readers, consoles and OLED TVs to Amazon, Microsoft/Nintendo and Samsung.
Pure offense also loses. Promotion-focused companies have a 26% chance. They cannot bring their cost-to-sales ratio down at all (prevention companies cut it by 3 points), their optimism blinds them to early warning signs, and when they finally must cut, every function believes it is essential and decisions seize up. HP "doubled down" with a $25B Compaq deal, +9% R&D, $200M on branding, $1B on IT in developing countries — and by 2004 its EBITDA margin was 8.4% against IBM's 16.8% and Dell's 9.3%.
The winning foundation has three parts. 1. Selective defense: cut cost of goods sold by rethinking how the business runs — supply chain, structure, processes — rather than by cutting people. Only 23% of progressive firms laid people off versus 56% of prevention firms. Companies that relied on workforce cuts alone had an 11% chance of breaking away. Efficiency cuts are permanent; layoffs come back as rehiring costs, lost morale and late scale-up. 2. Comprehensive offense: spend more than rivals on both market development (SG&A, R&D) and assets (capex, PP&E, bought cheap). The best cell of the 3×3 matrix — operational efficiency plus both kinds of investment — delivers 13.0% sales and 12.2% EBITDA growth. The worst cell is layoffs plus both kinds of investment: 3.3% sales and −5.2% EBITDA. You cannot invest your way out after you have removed the people who would execute. 3. Customer need as the filter: "Progressive companies stay closely connected to customer needs — a powerful filter through which to make investment decisions." Target read that "wants" spending was collapsing and doubled its food floor space; food became a $1.8B business.
The 2023 article adds the human foundation. Strategy alone did not explain why so few manage it. Three mindsets do: sensemaking (act first, then learn — "when you're lost, any old map will do"), a bootstrap ethic (frugal everywhere except where it makes you more effective for the customer), and stakeholder balance (spread the pain, do not dump it on one group). Alaska Airlines did all the defensive things in 2020 — hiring freeze, pay cuts, no dividends — and was still the only major U.S. airline to order 68 Boeings that December. Both at once is the whole point.

Caveat worth saying in class: the four groups only include companies whose resource shifts were in the top or bottom third relative to their industry; the 21–37% odds are within those groups, which is why they are higher than the 9% headline.

Q2. How do firms across industries use creative strategies to grow top and bottom line in difficult markets?

Short answer: the winners in both articles do the same three things in different clothes — they cut where the customer will not notice, they invest where the customer is going, and they buy what rivals are dropping. Here are the patterns, with the cases behind each.

Cut the model, not the people — then use the savings to fund the offense. Staples (2000–02) closed underperforming stores but added 10% to headcount to staff new high-end categories and services, while holding operating costs flat. Sales doubled from $7.1B (1997) to $14.6B (2003); Office Depot, which cut 6% of staff but could not lower operating costs, went from $8.7B to $13.4B and saw sales growth fall from 19% to 8%. Staples was about 30% more profitable in the three years after. Firefly (2020) cut sales and support headcount, took a 20% company-wide pay cut, renegotiated fleet contracts and moved engineering to Turkey — then used the money to hire a chief revenue officer and keep building the forecasting and optimization tools customers were asking for.
Read the customer's new "need" and move the whole business toward it. Target in 2008 saw same-store sales fall as Wal-Mart's everyday-low-price message landed. Instead of discounting across the board, it noticed "wants" were collapsing and "needs" were not, doubled floor space for food, extended Market Pantry (+30% sales by 2008) and Archer Farms (+13%), reworked operations behind it and leaned the slogan "Expect more, pay less" toward the second half. Food became a $1.8B business. Panera read that store-manager turnover was destroying the customer experience and raised baseline pay, added training, and tied pay to store results so the best managers earn six figures — funded by above-inflation menu pricing plus demand-stimulators like flatbread pizzas and a $10.99/month Sip Club. Revenue growth beat the industry and turnover fell 10%.
Buy assets while they are cheap — but only if you also change how you make money. Alaska Airlines placed a 68-aircraft Boeing order in December 2020 when every rival was cancelling, took the 52 options and then locked in 105 more through 2030 — and used the order to simplify from a mixed Airbus/Boeing fleet to Boeing only, which lowers operating cost permanently. It also locked in five labor deals in 2022 so it would have crews when demand returned. Target in 2000–02 raised capex 50% (947 → 1,107 stores, SuperTarget 30 → 118) and changed the model: Amazon partnership instead of building e-commerce alone, designer collaborations (Graves, Starck, Oldham) for "cheap chic," co-founding the WorldWide Retail Exchange to cut procurement cost, folding Dayton's and Hudson's into Marshall Field's. Result: +40% sales, +50% profit through the recession. The counter-example is TJX: +300 stores on a base of 1,350, +25% square footage, capex nearly doubled — sales 4 points above peers, but bottom-line growth 9% below peers three years later, because it only scaled the old model.
Keep investing in the long-term transformation, but change the pace, not the destination. Edward Jones started its "human-centered complete wealth management" transformation in 2019 and let investment outrun revenue growth through the pandemic. In 2022–23, with peers cutting, it postponed hiring 1,000 associates but strengthened FP&A so every investment carried a business case and success metrics, and sequenced projects by value — fixed-income IT before equity IT. Pennington: "We invest when times are good, and we invest when times are hard."
Share the pain across stakeholders so you keep the relationships you will need later. Levi Strauss in 2020 suspended dividends and cut 15% of staff ($100M saved) — but extended health benefits to the departing, added benefits for those who stayed, gave vendors nearly $2M in grants and helped them find financing, and kept its sustainability programs running. It could have saved more; it chose to keep the people and suppliers it would need in the recovery.

What is common: every one of these moves starts from a sentence about the customer — what they stopped buying, what they still need, what they will want when the storm passes — and works backward to what to cut and what to buy.

Q3. How do these firms actually implement the changes?

Short answer: implementation is where most companies fail, and Gulati's 2023 article is really an answer to this question. Both articles together give a five-step playbook, and each step has a named obstacle.

Pressure-test first, then look for the edge. Resilience "requires both pressure-testing your firm's operational and financial health (its P&L and balance sheet) in worst-case scenarios and staying alert for measures you might take, even amid chaos, to find a winning edge." Alaska Airlines did the stabilizing moves (hiring freeze, pay cuts, vendor terms, no buybacks or dividends, lower capex) before it placed the aircraft order — and it placed the order because it was "confident that its balance sheet was strong." Offense is earned by defense, not instead of it.
Act before the picture is complete, then correct. Weick's lost soldiers walked out of the mountains with a map of the wrong range. Resilient leaders "define their ultimate goals and then make thoughtful initial moves, adjusting and pivoting when necessary." Gulati noted in 2010 that "few progressive business leaders have a master plan when they enter a recession. They encourage their organizations to discover what works and combine those findings in a portfolio of initiatives." Edward Jones kept the destination fixed and changed the route: postpone 1,000 hires, strengthen FP&A, sequence fixed-income before equity.
Use one filter for every cut and every investment: does this make us more effective for the customer we serve? This is the bootstrap ethic — efficiency in tandem with effectiveness, Drucker's "doing things right" and "doing the right things" together. If yes, keep and invest; if no, cut. It is also the answer to the organizational obstacle: budget reallocation causes internal strife, and a customer focus "provides a clear basis for making the right mix." Firefly cut sales staff but kept engineering because customers were demanding better planning tools; Panera raised manager pay because managers are the customer experience.
Make bravery a norm, not a mood. The cultural obstacle is loss aversion — the same psychology that makes prevention-focus the default in a crisis. The fix is to "explicitly nurture bravery as a cultural value, adopting courageous behaviors as cultural norms and exemplifying those behaviors themselves." Minicucci's "we wanted to be aggressive to enable our recovery" and Pennington's "it would be riskier not to invest" are the CEO saying the brave sentence out loud so the organization can.
Give decision-makers one overarching purpose, and balance the stakeholders who bear the cost. The strategic obstacle is reconciling short-term efficiency with long-term investment and then communicating it. The fix is "an overarching purpose or business intent that gives decision-makers clear direction and helps them make painful trade-offs." Then practice practical idealism: extract short-term concessions but limit the pain. Levi's cut 15% and still extended health benefits and funded vendors; Edward Jones cut spending but still paid (reduced) adviser bonuses and funded financial-fitness programs. Singh's test — "if I can sleep well at night" — is the honest version of "there is no formula."

Two implementation traps from the 2010 data worth naming: - Centralized across-the-board cuts. When finance cuts every line equally, it "pays little attention to initiatives that may be the nuclei of postrecession growth," and pessimism and disempowerment spread. Cuts have to be made by people who can tell the nucleus from the frill. - Investing after you have gutted execution. The worst cell in the matrix (−5.2% EBITDA) is layoffs plus full investment. Sequence matters: protect the people who will deliver the offense before you launch it.

Case Summary

Article one (2010): a study of 4,700 companies. In December 2008, with the Great Recession in full swing, Gulati, Nohria and Wohlgezogen launched a year-long project to answer a question with almost no empirical research behind it: what strategy should you use during a recession in order to win after it? They took 4,700 listed companies from Compustat through the three previous recessions (1980–82, 1990–91, 2000–02), and for each one looked at the 3 years before, the recession itself, and the 3 years after, using six balance sheet items to measure changes in resource allocation: headcount, cost of goods sold/sales, R&D spending, SG&A, capital expenditure, and the stock of fixed assets. Only changes in the top or bottom 33rd percentile relative to the industry average counted as a "significant increase or decrease."

The results were stark. 17% of companies didn't survive the recession. Among the survivors, 80% hadn't returned to their pre-recession growth rates three years later, and 40% hadn't even returned to their absolute pre-recession levels. Only about 9% did better after the recession than before, outpacing peers by more than 10% in both sales and profit growth. Of the growth leaders before the recession, 85% were knocked off their perch during it.

Borrowing Columbia University psychologist Tory Higgins's theory of "promotion focus / prevention focus," the authors sorted companies into four types: prevention-focused (only cut, and invest more than rivals in nothing), promotion-focused (invest more than rivals in at least one item, and cut no item more than rivals), pragmatic (lay off staff or cut COGS, while investing more in at least one of SG&A / R&D / capex / fixed assets), and progressive (cut COGS but lay off no more than peers, while out-investing rivals both on the market side — SG&A / R&D — and on the asset side — capex / fixed assets). The probabilities of each type breaking away after the recession were 21%, 26%, 29% and 37% respectively.

Then come a set of contrasting stories. In the 2000 recession, Sony cut headcount by 11%, R&D by 12% and capex by 23% within two years; its profit margin rose from 8% to 12%, but sales growth fell from 11% to 1%, and it was subsequently overtaken in e-readers, game consoles and OLED TVs by Amazon, Microsoft and Nintendo, and Samsung respectively; in December 2008 it again announced US$2.6 billion in cost cuts, 16,000 layoffs and the postponement of an LCD plant in Slovakia. HP went the other way in the same recession: Fiorina said, "In blackjack, you double down when the odds are in your favor," and so it bought Compaq for US$25 billion, raised R&D by 9%, spent US$200 million on brand advertising and US$1 billion on IT in developing countries — management attention was spread thin, and in 2004 its EBITDA margin was 8.4%, against IBM's 16.8% and Dell's 9.3%.

Office Depot and Staples are the cleanest pair. Office Depot cut 6% of staff, failed to bring operating costs down, and saw sales growth fall from 19% to 8%; Staples closed underperforming stores but increased headcount by 10% to support newly launched premium categories and services, while keeping operating costs in check — sales doubled from US$7.1 billion in 1997 to US$14.6 billion in 2003, while Office Depot went from US$8.7 billion to US$13.4 billion, and in the three years after the recession Staples' profit margin was about 30% higher. Target and TJX are another pair: Target raised marketing by 20% and capex by 50%, grew its stores from 947 to 1,107, partnered with Amazon, and hired designers for "cheap chic," while building a B2B procurement exchange and consolidating its department store brands — during the recession, sales rose 40% and profits 50%; TJX added 300 stores in the same period, expanded floor space by 25% and nearly doubled capex, with sales 4 points above peers, but three years later its profit growth was 9% below peers — because it had simply scaled up the old model without changing the business model.

The article concludes with a nine-box grid: defensive moves (layoffs / operational efficiency / both) × offensive moves (market development / asset investment / both). The best box is operational efficiency × investing in both market and assets, with sales at 13.0% and EBITDA at 12.2%; the worst box is layoffs × investing in both market and assets, with sales at 3.3% and EBITDA at −5.2%. Progressive companies are "selective in defense and comprehensive in offense," and "closely connected to customer needs — the most powerful filter for making investment decisions."

Article two (2023): thirteen years later, the same author returns to talk about mindset. The article opens with Alaska Airlines. In early 2020 its passenger traffic plunged 96% year on year, and it did everything its peers did — froze hiring, cut executive pay, renegotiated supplier payments, suspended buybacks and dividends, slashed capex — but in December 2020, as rivals were cancelling aircraft orders, it ordered 68 Boeings plus 52 options, the only major US airline to place a big order that year, and used the moment to consolidate its fleet from Airbus + Boeing to all Boeing. CEO Minicucci said: "You can't grow in this business without airplanes." In 2021–22 it exercised the 52 options, locked in another 105 through 2030, and in 2022 concluded 5 labor agreements. In 2022 its pre-tax margin was among the highest in the industry.

Gulati says the 2010 study only answered "what to do," not "what kind of mindset makes leaders dare to do both at once." He offers three mindsets: sensemaking, the bootstrap ethic, and stakeholder balance.

Sensemaking draws on a story told by Karl Weick: a unit of soldiers lost for days in snowstorm-swept mountains; someone found a map, morale soared, and they made their way back to base — only later did they discover the map was of a different mountain range. "When you are lost, any old map will do": the map's role isn't to show the way, it's to get people moving; once they move, the terrain starts giving feedback. Edward Jones is the example: it launched a transformation in 2019, and both during the pandemic and amid the economic clouds of 2022–23 people asked whether to pause; CEO Pennington's answer was that "not investing is more dangerous," but the approach was step by step — postponing 1,000 hires, strengthening FP&A, requiring evaluation metrics for every investment, upgrading the fixed-income system before the equities system. "We invest in good years, and we invest in bad years."

The bootstrap ethic begins with a line from Nietzsche: "The most common stupidity consists in forgetting what one is trying to do." Drucker, for his part, said efficiency is doing things right and effectiveness is doing the right things. Frugality should be like an early-stage startup's: obsessive about customer value, stingy about everything else, filtering every expense through one question — "Does this make us better able to serve our target customers?" If yes, keep it and invest more; if no, cut it. When Firefly's revenue went to zero, it cut sales staff, reduced everyone's pay by 20% and moved engineering to Turkey, then used the savings to hire a CRO, keep investing in engineering, and make acquisitions at low valuations in 2021 and 2022. Panera, amid labor shortages and rising costs, went the other way, raising pay, adding training and tying store managers' performance pay to six figures, funded by above-inflation price increases, new products and the US$10.99 Sip Club; as a result revenue growth outpaced the industry and turnover fell 10%.

In between is a section on why attacking and defending at once is hard in three ways — organizational (additions and cuts happen simultaneously, and budget reallocation sparks infighting; the solution is to use customer focus as the basis), cultural (loss aversion makes people afraid to move; the solution is to explicitly cultivate courage as a cultural value and lead by example), and strategic (balancing the short and long term makes it hard to form and communicate a coherent strategy; the solution is an overarching purpose, or business intent).

Stakeholder balance uses a metaphor from Sumantra Ghoshal: the best leaders are like Chinese chefs who can cook sweet-and-sour — able to look after stakeholders with completely different demands at the same time. In a crisis, the various parties become tribal; the solution is "practical idealism": ask certain groups for short-term concessions, but limit their pain while attending to longer-term needs. In 2020 Levi Strauss suspended its dividend, cut 15% of staff and saved US$100 million, but extended health coverage for departing employees, gave suppliers nearly US$2 million in assistance, and maintained its sustainability programs. CFO Harmit Singh said: "There's no right answer, no formula, and I'm sure someone could find fault with it. But if I can sleep at night, I think we're in the right place."

The article ends on a question — borrowing Vivian Greene's words: would you rather crouch down and wait for the storm to pass, or learn to dance in the rain?

Key Data

Dimension	Figure / Fact	Source
Sample and method	4,700 Compustat listed companies; three recessions; six resource allocation items; top/bottom 33rd percentile relative to industry counts as significant	① Sidebar p.4
Damage from recession	17% perished; of survivors, 80% didn't recover growth rates, 40% didn't recover absolute levels; 85% of growth leaders knocked off their perch	① p.2–3
Share of winners	≈9% better after recession and ahead of peers by ≥10% (conclusion holds at thresholds of 5–20%)	① p.3, Sidebar
Probabilities by type	21% / 26% / 29% / 37%; layoffs only: 11%	① exhibit p.5, p.6
CAGR by type	Prevention 6% / 4%; promotion 8% / 6%; progressive 13% / 12%; progressive about 4 / 3+ points above pragmatic	① p.4–5, p.7
Three-year cumulative gap (derived)	Progressive 1.13³ ≈ 1.44 vs prevention 1.06³ ≈ 1.19 → after three years, a gap of about 25 percentage points in sales scale	My own calculation
Top 200 companies (post-2000)	Average +$12B; prevention +$5B / +$0.6B; promotion +$15B / +$1.5B; progressive +$28B / +$6.6B	① p.4–5
Layoffs and cost ratios	23% of progressive companies laid off staff vs 56% of prevention-focused; prevention-focused cut cost/sales by about 3 points, promotion-focused couldn't bring it down	① p.5–6
Nine-box grid	Layoffs×market 4.6/6.6; layoffs×assets 3.9/3.3; layoffs×both 3.3/−5.2; efficiency×market 7.1/4.2; efficiency×assets 8.4/8.4; efficiency×both 13.0/12.2; both×market 5.2/2.1; both×assets 5.2/−0.5; both×both 9.2/4.6	① exhibit p.6
Sony	2000: −11% headcount, −12% R&D, −23% capex; profit margin 8%→12%; sales growth 11%→1%; 2008: $2.6B, 16,000 jobs	① p.3–4
HP	$25B Compaq; R&D +9%; $200M brand; $1B developing-country IT; 2004 EBITDA margin 8.4% vs 16.8% / 9.3%	① p.5
Office Depot / Staples	OD cut 6%, growth 19%→8%; Staples headcount +10%, $7.1B→$14.6B (+106%); OD $8.7B→$13.4B (+54%); Staples profit margin about 30% higher	① p.6
Target 2000	Marketing +20%, capex +50%; 947→1,107 stores (+17%); SuperTarget 30→118; sales +40%, profit +50%; profit margin 9%→10%	① p.7
Target 2008	Food floor space doubled; Market Pantry +30%, Archer Farms +13%; food $1.8B	① p.8
TJX	+300 stores (on a base of 1,350, +22%), floor space +25%, capex nearly doubled; sales 4 points higher, profit growth 9% lower	① p.7–8
Alaska Airlines	−96% traffic; 68 + 52 aircraft (Dec 2020); +52 exercised + 105 options (2021–22); 5 labor agreements (2022); 4–8% annual growth through 2025	② p.1–2
Edward Jones	2019 transformation; postponed 1,000 hires; 50,000+ employees; three stakeholder groups	② p.5–6, p.11
Firefly	Revenue ≈0; 20% pay cut; moved to Turkey; hired a CRO; acquisitions in US 2021 / UK 2022	② p.7–8
Panera	Sip Club $10.99/month; turnover −10%	② p.8
Levi Strauss	Cut 15%, saved $100M; supplier assistance nearly $2M (≈2% of the savings); sustainability programs maintained	② p.10
Three challenges	Organizational / cultural / strategic, each with a solution: customer focus / cultivating courage / overarching purpose	② p.9

Key People

Person	Role	Position / Role in the story	Relationships
Ranjay Gulati	HBS professor, author of both articles; teaches this class	Moves from "strategy" (2010) to "mindset" (2023); argues defense should be selective and offense comprehensive	Collaborated with Nohria (later HBS dean) on the 2010 study; cites Higgins, Weick, Drucker, Nietzsche, Ghoshal, James
Tory Higgins	Columbia University psychologist	Theory of promotion focus / prevention focus, the psychological source of the four-type classification	Drawn on by ①
Karl Weick	Organizational psychologist	"When you are lost, any old map will do" — the source of sensemaking	Drawn on by ②
Sumantra Ghoshal	Late LBS professor, founding dean of ISB	"The best leaders are like Chinese chefs who can cook sweet-and-sour"	Gulati's colleague
Carly Fiorina	HP CEO at the time	Cautionary example of the promotion-focused type: "double down"	Rivals IBM, Dell
Ben Minicucci	Alaska Airlines CEO (president at the time)	The only airline to place a big order in 2020; "no airplanes, no growth"	Rivals cancelling orders; supply chain (Boeing)
Penny Pennington	Edward Jones CEO	"Not investing is more dangerous"; step by step; "financial balance" among three stakeholder groups	Digital rivals; 50,000 employees
Kaan Gunay	Firefly co-founder and CEO	Bootstrapping at a small company: cut sales, protect engineering, hire a CRO, acquire cheaply	Fleets and drivers (renegotiated contracts)
Niren Chaudhary	Panera CEO	Invested in people against the grain amid labor shortages; paid for it with price increases and new products	Store managers, price-sensitive customers
Harmit Singh	Levi Strauss CFO	"If I can sleep at night, we're in the right place"	Departing employees, suppliers, investors
Mark Wiedman	Head of BlackRock's global client business	Crises push executives into "panic mode"	Outside observer

Decision rights rest with each company's CEO; in both articles the opposing forces are "internal" — across-the-board cuts from finance, departments blaming one another, loss aversion, tribalism; external pressure comes from the recession itself, rivals and the supply chain.

Core Tensions

The fastest way to save money (layoffs) vs the ability to recover after the recession: layoffs work fastest — 56% of prevention-focused companies cut staff, and their cost ratio fell 3 points over three years; but companies relying only on layoffs had an 11% chance of breaking away, and rehiring during recovery is costlier and slower. Only 23% of progressive companies laid people off, yet they posted 13% / 12%. The professor's first theme (the foundations of competitive advantage) lands on this one.
Defense vs offense, or defense × offense: treat the two as opposite ends of a single line (cut a bit more or invest a bit more) and the conclusion is "compromise"; the article says they are two independent dimensions to be pursued simultaneously — and laying people off and then investing across the board is the worst combination (−5.2%), because the people who would carry out the investments are gone.
An optimistic culture vs seeing reality: promotion-focused companies attract people with optimism, and because of that optimism they ignore early signals of shrinking customer budgets; when they finally have to cut costs, every department thinks it matters, and decision-making seizes up. HP is the example.
Scale vs model: TJX and Target both expanded during the recession; the difference is that TJX only scaled up its old model, while Target changed its procurement, brands and channels. Cheap assets don't mean you should buy.
Acting vs thinking it through: Weick's old map says get moving first; but Edward Jones's approach was stepwise and metric-driven. "Any old map" doesn't mean no map — it means don't wait for the map to be perfect.
Short-term stakeholders vs long-term stakeholders: Levi's could have saved more by laying off another 1,000 people, but it chose to share the pain — a dimension new in the 2023 article and absent from the 2010 study.
The author's position in 2010 vs 2023: the first article says "a few had a master plan; most discovered as they went"; the second calls for an overarching purpose. The two are actually complementary — purpose sets the direction, sensemaking sets the steps.