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Episode 001 · Strategy

A plan can be excellent and still not be a strategy.

This episode asks a deceptively simple question: what actually is strategy, how is it different from planning, and what should an executive do differently as a result?

The central idea

Planning is about projects, timelines, budgets, responsibilities and sequencing. Strategy is about making consequential choices: where to compete, how to win, what to prioritise, what to stop and where scarce resources should go.

The episode draws together different but complementary perspectives from Roger Martin, Michael Porter, Richard Rumelt, Henry Mintzberg, A.G. Lafley, Donald Hambrick and James Fredrickson. They are not giving the same definition. They are answering different questions about competitive position, coherent action, choice, emergence and strategic completeness.

Three things to take away

• Do not confuse a well-made plan with a strategy. A plan can be disciplined, measurable and board-ready while still avoiding the hard choices.
• Strategy requires trade-offs. If nothing meaningful is being declined, stopped or deprioritised, the organisation may be describing ambitions rather than making choices.
• Look at allocation. What gets funded, staffed, protected and stopped often reveals the real strategy more clearly than the strategy document does.

Monday morning

Take your current strategy document and mentally remove the vision, targets, projects, milestones and budget. What consequential choices remain? Then compare those choices with where money and management attention actually went. If the answer is “not much,” you may have a plan rather than a strategy.

AI disclosure: This project uses extensive AI assistance for research, synthesis and production. The learning is human-directed, sources are named, competing views are preserved, and AI use is disclosed rather than hidden.