Most business strategies aren’t strategies at all. They’re goals dressed up as plans, generic to-do lists, or beautiful fluff. Here’s how to tell whether yours is the real thing, and how to write a business strategy that actually gives your team direction, drawn from my conversation with the London strategist Alex M H Smith.
Four weeks before I wrote this, I’d never heard of Alex. Three weeks before, I was reading his book, No Bullshit Strategy. Two weeks before, I wrote about him in Bright Objects. Then I interviewed him on Slideshow with Dave Hayward. I’m always on the hunt for a good framework, and Alex has a brilliant one for working out whether a strategy is actual strategy.
Why business strategy matters more than ever
Alex has a sobering thesis: we’re in the most competitive era of all time, and a good product plus hard work is no longer enough.
One symptom hit close to home. “I think the lifestyle business is dead,” he told me. “If you want a lifestyle business, there’s only one left. And it’s called a job.” I felt very seen, writing from my home office. Mind you, as the son of entrepreneurs, I never thought working for yourself was easier than having a job.
His point is that it only takes one person in your market who isn’t treating it as a lifestyle, someone up all night pulling every lever, and they’ll crush everyone who just wants to pick the kids up from school. As he puts it, most businesses’ moat is simply that “other people could not be bothered to do what they’re doing.”
The three types of bad strategy
So start by testing whether you have a strategy at all. Alex sees three kinds of bullshit strategy:
- Goals dressed up as a plan. “Our strategy is to become the supplier of choice in our industry.” That’s a desire. “You need to be giving your team an instruction,” Alex says. “Nothing wrong with wanting to be number one, but you need to say: we’re gonna become number one, and the way we are gonna do it is by doing X.”
- Plans so generic any competitor could run them. Hire five more salespeople. Expand into a new region. Update the product line. All probably necessary, and none of them gives you an edge. His rule of thumb: “If your competitors could say or do it too, it’s not strategy.”
- Fluff. Something that sounds visionary but nobody can execute. I brought up the “start with why” era, and Alex agreed: people confused purpose with strategy for years, and you’d end up with something like “our strategy is to elevate the human spirit via B2B”. Beautiful. Useless.
Why do smart people keep falling for all three? “Because you can get away with it,” Alex says. “Until recently, you could be completely reactive, work hard, do best practice, and the natural moats of incompetence would result in you being able to run a successful business.”
How to write a business strategy: make it an argument
Alex argues you should write your strategy as prose: a 600-word essay, with no slides and no bullet points. His benchmark is Elon Musk’s 2006 blog post, The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan. Before the first car launched, it said, in effect: here’s what we’ve noticed, here’s what everyone else is getting wrong, here’s what we’re doing instead. “Off they went, and it worked exactly the way he spelt it out.”
“Strategy is an argument,” Alex says. “It is not a list of initiatives.”
Most businesses never get there. “We are like ships on the sea, but we don’t actually plot a course. We think being the captain means making sure the decks are clean and the crew are happy. And we never go anywhere.”
Three steps to test and rewrite your strategy
- Run it through the test. Print your strategy. Read each line. Is it a goal dressed up as a plan? Could a competitor say the same thing? Is it beautiful but impossible to act on? Cross out everything that fails. What’s left is what you actually have.
- Write what survives as prose. An essay that says what you’ve noticed about your market, what everyone else is getting wrong, and what you’re doing instead. If you can’t write it, you don’t have a strategy yet.
- Read it to someone on your team and ask them to argue with it. If they can’t tell you why it will work, or they just nod politely, you’ve written fluff. A real strategy provokes a reaction, because it’s making a bet.
Be a weather-maker
Alex calls it the difference between a weather-maker and a weather-taker. You want to be the one making the weather in your industry. Once you accept that, he says, it’s actually quite fun. It’s fun to be ambitious, and to have a mission connected to the commercial engine of your business.
If you’d like help pressure-testing your strategy or your brand strategy, book 30 minutes with me.
Questions people ask
What’s the difference between a strategy and a plan?
A plan is a list of things to do. A strategy is an argument for how you’ll win: what you’ve noticed about the market, what others are getting wrong, and what you’ll do instead. The plan should follow from it.
How long should a business strategy be?
Alex M H Smith suggests about 600 words, written as prose. Short enough to read in a few minutes, long enough to make an argument.
How do I know if my strategy is generic?
Swap in a competitor’s name. If the strategy still works for them, it isn’t yours.
This article first appeared in Bright Objects, my fortnightly newsletter on brand, marketing strategy and AI for business and tech leaders. Subscribe here.
Sources and further reading
- Alex M H Smith, No Bullshit Strategy: Goodreads
- Basic Arts, Alex M H Smith’s newsletter
- Slideshow with Dave Hayward, Alex M H Smith: Why your moat is crumbling (YouTube)
- Elon Musk, The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (2006)
If you know your business is all steak and needs some sizzle….. we’d love to hear from you.
Dave Hayward
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Warm personal stories wrapped around solid business, revenue and marketing strategy, how-tos, technology discussion (especially AI), philosophies and tactics. Occasionally, we’ll talk about personal productivity and things important to us (like astronomy and dogs).
