Purposeful accidents built more great companies than master plans ever did.
What surprised me most is that strategy is less about out-thinking an opponent and more about wrestling with your own fear of being wrong. Leaders build rigid plans and heroic narratives not because they believe in them, but because admitting uncertainty feels like weakness.
And bad strategy isn’t usually a failure of intellect. It’s a failure of courage. The refusal to face situations where there’s simply no good solution without absorbing painful losses. Or maybe it’s just pure ego.
The most uncomfortable implication is that there’s no prescription. Leaders need an open canvas, not a template. The onus is on them to understand the situation, the root causes, and the variables at play — before even thinking about solutions. That’s not a methodology. That’s just hard work.
The question I can’t resolve is simple: if the genius is a myth and committees produce mediocrity, what are leaders actually supposed to do?
My honest answer is that they need to stop fantasizing about historical leaders and tech founders. That’s just noise. They need to sit with the null sets — the situations where there’s no good solution, only less bad ones. Firing the underperformer. Cutting the comfortable but useless activity. Delegating to someone who might do it better than you.
That’s where strategy actually lives. Not in the master plan. In the hard choice nobody wanted to make.