Strategy is what integrates our success with specific development projects into the foundation for continued business success. Strategy is planning to make change work to our benefit. Successful application of total quality development leverages the success of our unit engineering tasks into the development of specific winning products and technologies. However, to achieve the fullest business success, we cannot develop a specific product in isolation. We strategically plan all development projects to ensure that we have the right amount of development to coordinate the various projects, to achieve efficiency in our development work, and to ensure that we have the right kind of development—neither too conceptually static nor chaotically dynamic.

Successful strategy enables us to achieve the maximum possible market presence that our successfully completed development of specific products and technologies will allow. If we develop each product in isolation, then we are expending a lot of development effort relative to our products' market presence. Successful strategy intertwines the development of various products to reduce our total development effort and to increase our market presence by creating a public perception of related products.

Thus, successful strategy maximizes the ratio of market presence to development effort. It is also our guide for making changes that negate our competitors' strengths, so that they will have difficulty in quickly following our lead. This sustains our competitive technical advantage, which then also gives us the opportunity to rearrange the market so that we achieve further competitive advantage.