I have read a great many strategy documents and I have developed a test for them that takes about a minute. I look for a sentence describing something the company has decided not to do. Not a risk it has noted, not a market it has deprioritised in a way that leaves the door open — a refusal. If there is no such sentence, the document is a forecast, and the meeting was a planning meeting wearing better clothes.
The distinction matters because the two things demand entirely different behaviour. A forecast says: here is where we expect to be, and here is what we will spend to get there. A strategy says: here is the thing we are giving up, and here is what we buy with it. Almost every document I see is the first and almost every one is called the second.
The give-up is the whole content
You can usually find where the strategy should have been by looking at the growth chart. There is a line going up and to the right and a set of initiatives underneath it, and each initiative is additive. New segment, new geography, new product, new channel. Nothing is being stopped. The company is going to do everything it does now and several more things, with resources that grew by a fraction of that.
Which means the real allocation decision has not been made in the document. It will be made later, unwritten, by whoever is loudest in the quarterly review, or by attrition, as the initiatives that had no owner quietly do not happen. The organisation experiences this as being busy and slightly incoherent, and it is not a failure of execution. Nobody chose.
I want to be fair to the people writing these. The reason the give-up is missing is rarely stupidity; it is that naming it is expensive. Saying the company will not pursue mid-market means telling the person who runs mid-market. Saying a product line is in harvest means the team hears that their careers are in harvest. Every genuine strategic choice has a name and a face attached, and a document that avoids all of them can be circulated without a single difficult conversation. That is its real function, and it is the same instinct that produces a reorganisation in place of a decision.
There is a second failure that looks like the first and is not. Some strategies do contain a choice, and it is buried under language nobody can operationalise — become the trusted partner, lead with innovation, be customer-obsessed. That is the definition problem rather than the courage problem, and it is more easily fixed: ask what would have to be measurably different in eighteen months, and keep asking until somebody says a number.
The version I would defend takes one page and is mostly uncomfortable. Here is where we compete and where we have stopped. Here is what we are funding and what we are deliberately starving. Here is what we would have to see to reverse it. A board that receives that has something to govern. A board that receives a growth chart with initiatives underneath is receiving a summary of a discussion that happened somewhere else, and it will approve it, because there is nothing in it to decline.
Topics opinionstrategymanagement
