Conventional wisdom has us believe that strategy is setting ambitious goals and driving execution. I say that line of thinking is delusional.
If sheer effort were to substitute for leverage, every stakeholder would be happy, every objective would be achieved, and organizations would never have to make a hard choice. But that’s not what happens. What happens is that organizations spread their resources thin trying to please everyone and pursue everything simultaneously — and in doing so, lose their edge entirely.
The moment a goal-centric approach meets a complex, gnarly challenge it can’t define or comprehend, leaders get stuck. So they produce more buzzwords, more initiatives — a dog’s dinner of activity that masks their utter failure to face the real obstacles.
There’s a company — let’s call it Royalfield — whose leadership demanded each division produce a strategy to hit arbitrary financial targets. They hit the short-term numbers. But they did it by destroying their technical leadership and sinking their market share — because nobody wanted to face the fundamental structural challenges beneath the surface.
The worst part? Even the smartest people fall into this trap. Not because it’s logical — but because it’s the path of least political and psychological resistance. It’s far easier and more socially rewarding to stand in front of a room and declare “we will be the best” than to look your team in the eye and say “we have major problems and fixing them will require budget cuts.”
Bad strategy isn’t a failure of intellect. It’s the intelligent avoidance of pain.
In my experience, the leaders who actually succeed are the ones who identify the crux first — the single most critical and solvable part of the challenge — because they know the alternative is mediocrity. So the question I keep coming back to — why is identifying the crux so rare if everyone already knows the alternative is mediocrity?