Your Strategy Document: Have You Tried Inverting It?

Opening

Dear reader, does your company have a document titled “Strategy”? You probably do. What does it say? “Customer-centric.” “Quality first.” “Fast execution.” Most strategy documents are full of phrases like these.

Honestly, I used to feel proud writing documents like this myself. “We’re going customer-centric”—saying it gives you the sense that you’ve set a direction. The team nods along.

But something I read recently turned this idea on its head. A founder who’s built not one but two unicorn companies said flatly: that’s not strategy—it’s just nice-sounding words. Today, let’s take apart the structure behind why most corporate strategies sound plausible but don’t actually work.

Defining Strategy: Without a Choice, It’s Not Strategy

To understand this, we first need to nail down what “strategy” actually means. We throw this word around too casually.

There’s a man named Roger Martin. He served as dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and was ranked the world’s No. 1 management thinker by Thinkers50 (as of 2017). He served as strategy advisor to P&G CEO A.G. Lafley, and the results were staggering. During Lafley’s tenure (2000-2009), P&G’s revenue doubled, profit quadrupled, and market cap grew by more than $100 billion. The number of mega-brands generating over $1 billion in revenue grew from 10 to 24.

Martin defines strategy this way: “Strategy is an integrated set of choices.” Without a choice, there’s no strategy. Michael Porter said something similar in a 1996 HBR paper: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

So let’s look at “customer-centric” again. Is this a strategy? Think about the opposite. What company would ever put forward “we’ll ignore our customers” as a strategy? If the opposite is obviously a foolish choice, then it’s not a real decision. It’s just a nice-sounding phrase. This is called a platitude¹—something everyone agrees with but that drives no actual change in behavior.