Is Your Strategy Beautiful?
Beauty + Execution = Beast Mode
In 2017, Greg Brockman had a problem.
His team of AI researchers + engineers was much smaller than better funded labs like DeepMind (Google), Facebook. He worried they would not be able to keep up, would not produce anything of consequence, and instead just continue dabbling with “interesting” research (as tends to be the fate of most AI labs).
Having correctly identified the crux of their challenge, he came up with a strategy. He gave the team of researchers and engineers a problem to solve: create AI software that could play Dota 2, a complex online battle game.
It wasn’t easy. But a couple years on, their software was beating thousands of human players.
The lessons learned building, deploying a successful AI solution to production (a complex dance of research, AI model training/development and engineering) became the template for their next project — ChatGPT. You know the rest.
It didn’t really matter it was Dota 2. Brockman needed a muse. A tangible, practical but complex enough problem to solve. Something to galvanize researchers and engineers to figure out how to work together to apply advanced AI research to a production solution.
Large Language Models (LLMs) existed before ChatGPT. But no one was able to deploy them practically at the massive production scale that OpenAI did.
Go ace Dota 2. A beautifully simple (but in no way obvious or easy) strategy.
There is beauty at the heart of every great strategy. Something poetic, a hint of the divine or sublime. Like beautiful art, architecture or nature — a mountain, a leopard, a butterfly, a rose, a river.
This is because beautiful/great strategy is not logically deduced from facts or information. There is no logical leap that takes you from the desire to build an AI lab that matters to mastering Dota 2 to ChatGPT. No framework, textbook or consultant will help you come up with this. This type of unique leap can only come from something beyond thought and the mind. From daring to wade into the deep unknown of your imagination.
“The majority of business men are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked. I am almost incapable of logical thought, but I have developed techniques for keeping open the telephone line to my unconscious.”
— David Ogilvy (founder Ogilvy & Mather)
Beauty is usually my first gut ‘measure’ of any strategy. I can immediately feel it. When there is beauty, it feels right. It feels good. It fits. There is a symmetry. Only once it passes the feel test, do I logically analyze it — almost like my mind tries to catch up to what my soul immediately recognized.
I can also feel the absence of it. It feels discordant or off in some way, like something is missing or not adding up. Forced. Or uninspired. And sure enough, an ensuing logical analysis usually reveals the underlying flaws and gaps.
Why does beautiful strategy matter?
One, it matters as much as a beautiful painting or sculpture matters. For the sheer pleasure of it. Creating beauty is the act of summoning the divine into physical form. It just happens the “medium” in this case is business and strategy. The strategist’s canvas or slab of marble.
Setting aside the esoteric, there are practical reasons. It can be highly profitable and make for great business (when paired with great execution).
Constellation Software, Costco, IKEA, Starbucks, Patagonia, Gymshark, Bugati, Rolex, Cisco, Intel, Gumroad, Nike, Google, Snowflake, Slack, Apple, Polaroid (founder Edwin Land was Steve Jobs’s idol), Sutter Hill (venture capital firm with a beautifully unique model), NVIDIA (well before their dominance in AI), and of course, OpenAI (until the recent turmoil) are some companies (past and present) that come to mind (certainly not exhaustive) — they were either founded and/or continue to execute wonderfully on beautiful strategies (in some cases inspired by visionaries that came before them, e.g. Costco).
(There is a lot out there in terms of books, podcasts, blogs for the curious reader to follow-up on many of the companies above. I may also write on some of the above in future posts to dissect their strategies).
Beautiful strategy + Great execution = Beast mode.
How do you conceive beautiful strategy?
By understanding that strategy is not a 30-page slide deck justifying why we’ll win. That it isn’t just numbers, TAMs (total addressable market) and market shares. That it isn’t just frameworks. That it isn’t just build, buy or partner decisions. That it isn’t just cool features. That it isn’t just differentiating from your competitors.
Instead, it is to recognize strategy development is a creative act. The strategist is a creator. Like a songwriter or an artist. With passion, relentless curiosity, and a little madness flowing through their veins. This “opens the telephone line to the unconscious”.
But none of this is disconnected from reality. Far from it. Strategy addresses the truth by acknowledging reality (no matter how harsh). The strategist is also a keen investigator. They are able to see deeper into what is really going on with competitors, customers, one’s industry and company to isolate what is most important to address or leverage. Richard P. Rumelt refers to this as the diagnosis in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.
Brockman’s diagnosis was critical to OpenAI’s success. He recognized their biggest challenge was remaining inconsequential in a red ocean of AI labs (big and small). Publishing “interesting” AI research or academic papers wasn’t the ticket out. They needed to produce an AI engineering solution at scale.
Beautiful strategy is a balance of the analytical and creative, logical and intuitive, conscious and unconscious, matter and divine, reality and ambition.
Beauty need not be confined to just museums and art galleries.
It belongs in the board room too.
I manage Artsgy, a strategy consultancy built on ideas like the above. See https://artsgy.com/. I also publish novel (and weird) ideas in Product/Strategy at https://insanelygreatstrategy.substack.com/.
