What Is Strategy?
Strategy is choice. And choice implies saying no.
Roger Martin — ranked the world's #1 management thinker in 2017, and advisor to Fortune 500 CEOs worldwide — offers the clearest definition I have found:
"Strategy is an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions a firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition."
Notice what is absent: timelines, budgets, workstreams. Those are tools of execution. Strategy comes before them, and it constrains them. If you build a detailed operational plan before you have made your strategic choices, you are planning your way toward a destination you have not yet decided on.
What "Integrated" Actually Means
The word integrated is doing a lot of work in that definition. Choices should reinforce one another, be aligned with one another. A strategy that says "we will serve premium clients with a low-cost operating model" is not integrated but internally contradictory. Real integration means alignment between the market you choose to be active in, how you will try to win in that market and what capabilities and systems you will (and can) develop as scaffolding for those choices.
Saying 'No'
Strategy is choice, and choice implies saying 'no'. Saying 'yes' to some things and 'no' to others allows you to focus your resources in a way competitors unwilling to do the same cannot. The benefits of such focus compound over time. Market leaders generally get to take the lion's share of profits, which allows for higher levels of reinvestment than competitors. With that, focus can create an upwards spiral of competitive advantage.
What This Means for Your Next Strategy Session
The next time your team sits down to "do strategy," try asking a simple diagnostic question: are we making choices, or are we listing activities?
If the output of your session is a list of priorities that everyone could have predicted before the meeting started, you have not done strategy. You have done priority alignment. Useful, but not the same thing.
We help leadership teams work through their strategic choices and test the critical assumptions that underpin them. If this resonates, get in touch.