Strategy

You're sitting in a doctor's office for a follow-up. They ran your blood work last week, and you're here to talk about it.

You know the routine. The waiting room. The nurse who weighs you, takes your blood pressure, writes it all down, and tells you the doctor will be right in. Then you sit. You scroll your phone. You strain to hear what's happening in the next room.

A knock. The doctor comes in, washes their hands, rolls the little stool over, and sits down. Some pleasantries. "How have you been feeling?" Then they get to it.

"So. I looked at your blood work. Some good numbers, some bad numbers. My plan today is to improve your health by 15%."

You wait for the rest of the sentence. There is no rest of the sentence.

"Improve what, exactly?"

"Your health. We're going to get it up 15%."

"Okay. How?"

"Not sure yet. I'll start you on an over-the-counter multivitamin. It's got all of them in there, so one should do something. Come back in six months and we'll see how we're tracking to the 15."

Then they give you a fist bump, because they're a cool doctor, and walk out.

You'd be furious. No diagnosis. No idea what's actually wrong with you. No plan to fix it. Just a number and a good attitude.

So here's the question. Why do we accept exactly this at work?

Your boss sits the team down. "This year, our strategy is to grow revenue 20%." Heads nod. Someone opens a new slide. And nobody in the room says the thing everyone is thinking. That's the multivitamin. It's a number and a good attitude. It's the doctor again, and we're clapping.

A goal is not a strategy

Here's the part almost nobody says out loud. "Grow revenue 20%" isn't a strategy. It's a wish.

A goal is not a strategy.

• "Grow revenue 20%."
• "Improve efficiency."
• "Win more games."
• "Do AI."

Those are all desires. They're the 15%. They tell you where you'd like to end up and nothing about how you get there.

A strategy is the set of methods and actions you take to overcome the specific obstacle between you and what you want. Strategy is the how. It's the diagnosis the doctor skipped and the plan they never gave you.

Now, I can hear the pushback. "But we need goals. You can't run a company without targets." You're right. You absolutely need them. A goal tells you whether you're winning. It just doesn't tell you how to win. The goal is the scoreboard. The strategy is the game plan. Mixing the two up is how you end up clapping for a multivitamin.

Vision is strategy's other half. Product Vision (Part 02) has the full split, so I won't redo it here. One line is enough. Vision is the destination. Strategy is the route.

Most "strategy" is a goal in a costume

Once you see this, you can't unsee it. Most of what gets called strategy is a goal wearing nicer clothes.

Richard Rumelt wrote the book on this. Literally. It's called Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, and if you do any work related to strategy, go read it.

Using a doctor to explain this is his move, not mine. Rumelt runs the same analogy the other way around, the good doctor who diagnoses before prescribing. I flipped it and showed you the bad one. Credit where it's due.

His core line is the one to put on the wall. Bad strategy is long on goals and short on action. It names the score it wants and says nothing about how to play the game.

You've sat through both versions of it.

There's the deck with the chart where profit dips a little this year and then sails up and to the right for the next five. The hockey stick. Ask anyone in the room what specifically makes the line bend and you get silence. The real thing holding the company back, the problem everyone already knows about, doesn't appear on a single slide. A chart is not a plan.

Then there's the other version. The "strategic plan" that's 47 priorities long with 178 action items, and buried down in the list, action item number 122 is "create a strategic plan." When everything is a priority, nothing is.

If you're someone who builds strategy, one of the biggest requests you'll get this year is "We need an AI strategy."

No. Just.... no. AI is a tool. If you're going to have an AI strategy, why not have a strategy for Outlook.. for Zoom... for Excel...

You're supposed to find the problem first, then reach for the tool that fits it. "Our strategy is AI" does that backwards. "We're going to use AI" is the same sentence as "we're going to take a multivitamin." Might help. But it isn't a strategy, because it never names the obstacle it's supposed to get you past. This trap is everywhere right now, so it gets its own page at the end of this section. For now, just hold the line. A tool is not a strategy.

Strategy is mostly saying no

So if it isn't a goal and it isn't a tool, what's the actual work? It's choosing.

Strategy is mostly subtraction. Every real strategy says no to far more than it says yes to, because the entire point is to concentrate what little you have on the one obstacle that matters most. A plan that forbids nothing isn't a plan. It's a buffet.

Be a filter, not a funnel. A funnel lets everything in and trusts that someone, somewhere, later, will sort it out. A filter says no early and on purpose, so the few bets you actually make get enough focus to work. Yes is the easy word. It's also the expensive one. No is the word that protects the work.

Why almost nobody gets this right

Strategy&, which is PwC's strategy group, surveyed around 700 executives across a range of industries. They found that only 8% of company leaders were very effective at both strategy and execution. Both. Pick the right plan, and run it well. 8%.

Read that again. 92% of leaders can't reliably do the one thing a business has to do to stay alive, which is figure out the right move and then actually make it. Not because they're lazy. Because this is genuinely hard, and most people were never taught the difference between a strategy and a wish.

That's the gap. It's also the opening. If you can honestly diagnose a problem, choose your shot, and run it, you are rare.

So that's the bar. A strategy isn't a number you want. It isn't a tool you bought. It's the route past the specific thing standing between you and your vision. Diagnose first, then build the plan.

That's what's next. Five steps, the way I actually do it.