Strategy is a Choice List, Not a To Do List
The CEO had prepared over 140 slides – we kid you not, One. Four. Zero. – that detailed in meticulous detail the company’s strategy. This was not just any strategy deck; it was The Strategy for the next five years. And lest anyone lack the patience to read through it themselves, the CEO kept track of which individuals attended the webinars where they walked through each slide.
The commitment to communication, we applaud. The length, we critique. But there was a deeper issue here.
After these webinars, we asked staff from different teams and different offices, “So what’s your main takeaway?”
Each one had a different answer.
Hours went into communicating The Strategy, and many more went into creating it. Yet the impact of alignment was negligible.
Why?
Because despite its name in PowerPoint, the deck was no strategy at all. It was a to-do list, admittedly a very detailed one. To-do lists aren’t strategy; choice lists are.
What do we mean?
First, a strategy names the most important choices the company has to make. In our megadeck example, the strategy included many product launches, one after another, with little detail as to the reasoning why.
“Launch Product X” is an initiative. Launching Product X and not Product Y or Product Z is a strategy, because it recognizes the constraints of the real world. Elon Musk’s “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me)” demonstrates this brilliantly. In 2006, Elon wrote, “The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model.” 20 years ago, Elon very deliberately chose to launch at the high end in order to then afford cheaper models. He purposely had no desire to start with a low-cost electric car.
Second, a strategy extends the logic of a choice horizontally across the company. Richard Rumelt calls this coherence in his masterful book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. A choice to enter a new market is not a sales decision. It is a sales decision, a marketing decision, a technology decision, a hiring decision, and a cash decision. Back to our megadeck example. It was clear that the list of initiatives included the pet projects of the Chief Growth Officer, the Chief Marketing Officer, and the Chief Technology Officer. But no slide articulated how each initiative would require the collaboration of other teams. Rumelt surfaces another example: at one point Ford’s marketing wanted to elevate its brand to that of luxury, but its entire system of production focused on economies of scale. These two ideas are fundamentally incompatible.
Third, a strategy does not run on a schedule. It is reviewed when a major choice needs to be made or has just been made. Companies that revisit strategy only on an annual basis are companies that let the calendar make their choices for them. For example, one year ago, Tobi Lutke, the CEO and cofounder of Shopify, wrote a memo detailing the usage of AI within the company. That came in April, in response to the arrival of Claude Code and other developments in the field. Tobi did not wait until October because that’s when strategic planning happens and not in January when strategic plans are “launched.”
So here is the test. Pull up your current strategy document. Ask yourself three questions:
Is it clear what you’re not doing and why?
Is it clear how the initiatives relate to one another?
Does it reflect the world of today, not just of January?
If the answer is yes, congratulations, you have a strategy. Otherwise, you may just have a to-do list with better fonts.
