What a Real Strategy Contains
Ask ten leaders what strategy is and you’ll get ten answers, and ten very different artefacts labelled “strategy.” That matters, because how you define strategy determines what you do and what you end up with.
Richard Rumelt and Roger Martin have each argued that much of what passes for strategy isn’t. I’ve seen the same thing in my own client work. What gets labelled strategy is usually one of these:
- A list of ambitions: “Become the leading provider in our segment.” “Pursue operational excellence and customer centricity.” “Grow revenue 20% while expanding into adjacent markets.”
- Fluff: impressive language that says nothing.
- A goal mistaken for a strategy: a target is not a method.
- A set of non-choices: nothing is prioritised and no trade-offs are made.
- A plan with no diagnosis: the actual challenge is never named.
- What I mean by strategy
Strategy is finding a credible way to reach your goals with the limited resources you have. It starts with understanding what stands in the way and directs attention and resources to the choices most likely to make a difference. It must also explain why those choices should work.
It’s the definition I work from with clients because it connects what an owner wants to achieve with the challenge the business actually faces and the decisions needed to move forward.
It draws on three complementary approaches.
Rumelt: start with the diagnosis. His “kernel” links a diagnosis of the actual challenge, a guiding policy for dealing with it, and coherent actions that carry the policy out. Most strategy work starts at the actions (“we should do content marketing, expand to Germany, launch a product”) without stating what challenge those actions address. Without a diagnosis, you have no clear basis for judging whether the actions will help.
When I worked with a dev shop that had become four businesses serving nine industries, the diagnosis (“this is structural complexity first, not a sales problem”) was worth more than any single recommendation. It changed what the recommendations had to address. The business went on to focus on one product category, giving it a focus around which to simplify.
Porter: choose what not to do. The essence of strategy, he wrote, is choosing what not to do. You can see that discipline in my case studies: the marketing division that narrowed to one channel, the e-learning platform that chose one domain and audience, the architecture practice that specialised by client type.
But choosing a narrower focus only helps if it creates an advantage. For a dev shop, specialising in one product category can make it possible to reuse knowledge and technical components, deepen expertise and improve delivery. Those activities can reinforce one another and give customers a reason to choose the business. The strategic argument has to explain why customers would value that difference and how the business can deliver it profitably. That is what gives the decision to refuse other work its logic.
Martin and Lafley: make the choices explicit. Playing to Win, drawing on their work at Procter & Gamble, sets out five linked questions: What is our winning aspiration? Where will we play? How will we win? What capabilities must we build? What management systems must support it?
The answers have to fit together. A proposed way to win may require capabilities the business cannot realistically build, sending the team back to reconsider where it will play. Working through those connections is why the framework is the backbone of the strategy work I facilitate.
Leadership teams rarely lack opinions; they lack a structure that makes choices explicit and exposes disagreement. I watched three co-founders circle in decision paralysis for want of exactly that, and saw the business post a record year once a structured way of choosing was in place. Speaking the answers aloud helps reveal private versions of the strategy. The work is to resolve the differences and agree what the choices mean for real decisions.
Matching the discipline to the problem
Every strategy needs a sound diagnosis, genuine choices and coherent action. Different organisations need different starting points:
A founder-led business drowning in opportunistic work may need Porter’s trade-off discipline first.
A leadership team that agrees on everything vague and nothing specific may need the explicit choices of Playing to Win.
An organisation with a beautiful strategy document and declining results needs to test the connection between its diagnosis, choices and actions. The situation may have changed, the original reasoning may be wrong, or the choices may never have changed what the business does.
The craft is recognising where to begin while keeping the whole strategy in view.
The choices have to change what the business does
A strategy becomes concrete when it changes where money, people and leadership attention go. It identifies which capabilities need investment, which work will stop, and who is responsible for the actions that follow.
Those actions also need to support one another. A decision to specialise has little effect if sales keeps pursuing unrelated work and delivery keeps building whatever arrives. The commercial choices, the allocation of resources and the way the business operates have to support the same direction.
Strategy is a process
Finally, I see strategy as a living process a business does continuously. A document can record it, but the business has to keep putting it into practice and testing whether it works.
In practice, that means regular reviews, often quarterly, where the leadership team revisits the diagnosis and the assumptions behind its choices. What must be true for this strategy to work? What evidence would strengthen or weaken that belief? Are the choices being honoured in real decisions, and are they producing the intended results?
The measures should follow the strategic argument. If specialisation is expected to improve delivery and make the business more profitable, the team needs evidence of those improvements, alongside evidence that customers value the offer.
Reviewing the strategy does not mean changing it every quarter. The evidence may support staying the course. When it challenges the diagnosis or the logic of the choices, the team needs to reconsider the approach and the commitments that follow.
What a real strategy contains
A target is not a method. A real strategy connects a clear intended outcome with a diagnosis you’d defend and a set of choices you can explain. It says why those choices should work, what the business will decline, and how its activities will support one another. It commits resources to coherent actions and makes clear who will carry them through.
The leadership team should be able to explain that reasoning, use it to make decisions, and name the evidence that would cause it to reconsider. That is how strategy stays useful as the business changes.
