Leadership Quote by Michael Porter

Porter’s deliberately jarring word choice, “schizophrenic,” is doing managerial work: it shocks you out of the comfortable fantasy that strategy is a document you laminate and hang on the wall. He’s naming the double bind at the heart of modern corporate life. Investors, employees, and customers demand a coherent identity over time; markets, technologies, and competitors punish any organization that treats that identity as an excuse for inertia. The provocation is meant to make “both/and” feel as uncomfortable as it actually is in practice.

The intent is classic Porter: defend strategy as distinct from operational effectiveness while admitting that the real world forces them into constant contact. “Continuity of strategy” signals commitment and trade-offs; it’s an argument against the corporate hobby of chasing every trend, rebranding every quarter, and confusing activity with advantage. Then he pivots to “continuously improving,” a nod to the post-1980s rise of quality movements, lean thinking, and the broader culture of optimization that turned companies into perpetual beta versions of themselves.

The subtext: most firms fail not because they lack ambition, but because they can’t tolerate tension. They either calcify around a “vision” and let execution rot, or they become so addicted to incremental improvement that they optimize yesterday’s business model into irrelevance. Porter’s line is a warning disguised as a permission slip: you’re allowed to change how you do things, relentlessly, as long as you don’t change what game you’re trying to win.