Strategy is a means, not an end
Ask someone what a strategy is. Then ask someone else. Then a third person. I bet that every single one of them will say something different. It’s a set of principles. It’s a plan. It’s a way to help you focus. To justify ideas. To hold them accountable and measurable. It’s a way to understand where we’re going. And when we’ve arrived. It’s a map. It’s a compass. It’s all these things and a dozen others.
Defining strategy is hard because it depends on who you ask. And we have all these rules for what a great strategy is. We debate which part is an insight. What a goal is. How it differs from an objective. How all this informs a mission statement. And how a mission statement is different from a vision. And which metrics are adequate. Which are not. And how a strategy is different from an idea. Which in itself is different from a concept. Which in itself could actually be an insight. Ok, let’s start over. Everyone to the meeting room.
Sure, some answers are more correct than others. But it seems to me that we spend too much time talking about strategy as an end in itself. When actually, a strategy is a means to help you do something else.
If we treat strategy as an end, we get 80-page documents that riff about brand values. All thinking. Zero action.
The ‘strategy as end’ approach is what gives consultants a terrible reputation. As I once heard, when shit hits the fan a consultant is always safe because all she did was recommend something. If you executed on the advice and it failed, it’s your fault that the execution is bad.
This is why I wrote last year that great strategists understand execution too. The thinking should be in there but the thinking alone is not the job — how it informs the work is. The thinking is a means to help produce something else. Something exciting that people care about. Something effective that generates results. Whether it’s a new marketing campaign, a new product or a new business model.
This doesn’t answer the question of what strategy is. But perhaps it brings some sobriety to what it does. Great strategies are not the end game. They’re the means to help everyone focus around a problem and create something amazing. Let’s remember that when 3/4 of our presentations are about ‘setting the scene’.
