How Not to Do It
Step 1: Assemble and curate an amazing environment for dyed-in-the-wool engineering talent to express themselves creatively. Promote a culture of risk-taking, innovation, and moon-shots. Provide tools and resources to get things done quickly and intelligently. Reward the value-adding employees for the efforts.
Step 2: Sell the best products--by far--in each market category at competitive prices. Beat the competition on features and performance at every turn. Lead each major market as the brand to which everyone else compares themselves.
Step 3: DO NOT TELL ANYONE YOU MAKE THESE AMAZING THINGS.
Step 4: Fail to meet pretty conservative, and achievable financial goals.
Step 5: Take the rewards away from the value-adding employees. To compensate, do not fire any under-performing employees. Instead, just lower the bar for recruitment, and aim for a larger mass of mediocrity rather than focusing on a smaller target of excellence.
Step 6: Start releasing products that no longer lead their markets, but become "fast followers" on late and mediocre deliveries.
Step 7: Notice that revenue is down. Strip away more incentives to be creative, and only pay lip-service to innovation (i.e. stop investing actual money/tools/time in new ideas that can't turn a profit within a fiscal quarter).
Step 8: (not yet determined)
Beat yesterday?