In one corner of the parking garage near my office, there’s no reception for a car’s satellite radio.
This is clearly broken, but it’s also not a problem. Certainly not a problem worth anyone’s attention when there are so many other problems to be addressed.
Problems, by definition, can be fixed. But they might not be worth the focus and effort.
Letting these go is important, because it frees us up to work on the things that most people don’t think are problems that are worth fixing.
Thanks to Francis Wade for emailing me this review of THIS IS STRATEGY. Francis works in strategy, and I’m so delighted the book resonated the way it did.
Case: You are a corporate strategic planner – someone immersed in defining a future for your organization. But lately, you haven’t been challenged to think differently. Keep reading to see why This is Strategy offers you a unique opportunity.
If you have glanced at the reviews, you probably noticed a spike of one-star ratings.
Given my 5-star rating among others, how can you reconcile the wide gap? You’d probably like to do so before committing precious time and energy.
Here are three reasons to acquire this book and use it as a catalyst for your professional growth.
1) The content is deep. As a long-term strategic planning facilitator, my work confronts issues that most executive teams skim over in their customary short-term, emergency-driven thinking. Getting them to think about abstract questions for long hours at a time, while sitting face to face with their peers isn’t easy.
Yet, strategic thinking is essential to the future of the company. And the reasons it should be done is where this book starts.
Godin describes this as a philosophy book. In fact, the first “riff” (i.e. chapter) is titled “Strategy is a Philosophy of Becoming.”
“Who we will become,
who will we be of service to,
and who will they help others to become”
This is strategy.
For some, this will be a reason to drop the book and stop reading. But as you may know, there are significant obstacles to the aspiration stated above.
Some are practical, and there are lots of books which focus on taking the right steps, in the proper sequence, using the best frameworks to produce a strategic plan. If that’s what you want, look elsewhere. There’s lots of stuff out there on the Balanced Scorecard, PESTER, SWOT, 5-Forces, etc.
Instead, there are deeper reasons why Kodak, Blockbuster and Nokia lost their way. And why Intel seems to be doing the same in 2024, in slow motion. Seth is trying to get at the heart of the matter and he does so by going deeper than almost any book I have read on the topic.
So, if you are someone interested in the craft of strategic planning…the philosophic intent, you are in the right place.
2) The book’s structure is strikingly different from any other book on the topic. There are 297 chapters.
And each one is set up as a discrete “thought provoker”.
As such, this is no linear how-to.
Instead, it’s more like a book of daily meditations that builds on itself in a way that I must believe is unique for each reader. Depending on your current way of thinking, some parts will seem trite, others vaguely familiar and a few heretical.
But that’s OK. The point is not indoctrination.
Instead, he implies that if you buy into the notion of strategy as “Becoming” then this translates into certain aspirations, limits and obligations. Furthermore, these are inescapable.
As strategists we probably know what this means, for there was a time when we had a novice’s understanding of strategy. Now, we look back at who we were and smile. We had no idea of the world that we take for granted today, as we work with organizations (or government, countries etc.) in their quest to Become.
Seth gets it – and he’s the first to offer questions that take us into a range of topics that we can recognize. Even if we never find anyone else who gets it as well, we can still use these for self-study and reflection.
3) But this is no pie in the sky, abstract reasoning. There are four threads the book is built around: systems, empathy, games and time. Mastery of strategic planning requires a comprehension of how they work apart, and together.
They show up in practical ways. I am using snippets from one chapter in a meeting next week to help my audience of CEOs appreciate some ideas which I have found hard to language.
This language is a precursor to the words I’ll develop on my own eventually, but This is Strategy has given me a starting point to put some vaguely held ideas into words.
As strategic planners, this is what we do every day. Arguably, someone did this job effectively with Fujifilm in 2001. Someone else failed to do this with Kodak.
If you have read this far, you are probably a person who spends a great deal of time trying to produce Fujifilms, and prevent Kodaks. You may lead up a company, or consult. But as you go about your work, you may be nagged by the thought that, given the high stakes, “I need to get this right.”
The point of the book is that to super-charge your commitment you need language and a philosophy, and just a little bit of help, a nudge, to spur your thinking.
In summary – This is Strategy consists of 297 nudges which add up to a fresh, new possibility for you, in your way of engaging in strategic thinking.
In hospitality and customer service, perfect is elusive. Someone is going to miss a shift, have a bad day, or fail to understand a situation.
But there’s a second kind of error, the one that’s far more common. When management makes bad choices, or underinvests in systems, training and people, it’s not really an error. It’s a choice that costs everyone involved.
These are choices with consequences. Don’t blame the actors if you have a lousy script.
When you built that automated phone tree to save a few dollars on customer service, you were choosing to lose some of your best customers. When you planned a lazy and boring menu for the group meeting at your hotel, you chose to send a message of carelessness. And when you ask under-appreciated and poorly-trained staff to step up and be the face of your organization, you’re risking your future.
Customer service is a chance to create delight and impact. It can amplify or undermine the marketing investments that you say are important–and yet, management often fails to see the systems they are building and maintaining. Begin with, “we’re doing these things on purpose, with intent.”
As in all things, getting the systems right is the foundation for everything else that follows.
Your hospitality strategy is the problem, not bad luck or uncaring staff.
We’ve forgotten how often society had an answer for that question.
Perhaps our shift away from a dictated answer not only gives us freedom, it also creates ennui and fear.
The culture of a generation or two ago told you where to study, what to study, how to cut your hair, what to wear, where to work, how to present within your class or identity, what to listen to, what to eat, what to drive, where to live and more.
Things have changed, slowly and then all at once.
You’re way less likely to get picked.
The gatekeepers have left the gates unlocked.
And yet, the indoctrination of ‘supposed to’ continues.
The disconnect is real. Like all change, it’s not easy. One of the early subtitles of my new book was, “figuring out what to do next.”
Owning our choices is a privilege that we can learn to dance with.
There are very few activities that are fully reversible.
Ice sculpture might be one of them. Once the ice melts, all the effort and information is lost, and refreezing lets you begin again with a new, fresh block of ice.
Of course, it’s not completely gone. The thing you made remains in your memory, and in the consciousness of anyone your artistry touched.
There’s a lot of pressure to make things dumber. Better to make it dumb than to have someone simply walk away, apparently.
With so much to consume, and an unlimited amount to learn, there’s a race to make knowledge into a checklist item. Freon gas! Large language model! Coefficients! Many people just want to say a magic word and move on.
Of course, if we dumb things down, they become dumb.
This is not the same as simplifying concepts before adding nuance.
Four year olds easily learn to speak, and many kids in second grade can read. Not because they have a dumb version, but because someone cared enough to make the method simple.
There are simple explanations for quantum mechanics and for auto mechanics as well. They simply take a while to understand well enough to teach them to other people.
Start with basic principles, go slow and build. No need to dumb it down. Simple it up instead.
They’re ungainly, they’re slow but they’re also majestic. Like an elephant for ice hockey.
After each period, when the ice is chopped up by play, the Zamboni rolls out and leaves behind a sheet of perfect ice. Cold, smooth and untouched.
It’s useful to acknowledge that the same service is offered to each of us, every night. We wake up in the morning with a freshly smoothed-over day in front of us.
Our intentions determine our first few moves, the way we’ll engage with today’s ice. And those moves often lead to the next ones, and on and on, until the day is over.
Add up enough clear ice days and the pattern becomes set.
There are lights, camera and action, but mostly there’s the unreality of making it fit.
Happily ever after, a climax at just the right moment, perfect heroes, tension, resolution and a swelling soundtrack. Every element is amplified and things happen right on schedule.
Consume enough media and we may come to believe that our life is carefully scripted, and that we’re stars of a movie someone else is directing.
This distracts us from the truth that real life is more muddled and less scripted. There is no soundtrack. We’re actually signed up for a journey and a slog. Nothing happens ever after. It’ll change, often in a way we don’t expect.
We have no choice but to condense a story when we want to film it. Our real story, on the other hand, cannot be condensed, it can only be lived. Day by day.
Points aren’t just for games. Points are how we keep score and decide what to do next. Pick your scorekeeping wisely.
Too much focus on the score can bend us or break us, pushing us to engage with too much focus and without regard for balance.
And our attachment to obvious points strips us of our agency and independence.
If it’s subtle, variable and up to the user, the uncertainty can amplify our insecurity. “Wear festive clothing,” is an unwelcome line on an invitation, because the point system is unclear. How do I fit in? How do I not lose, or even win?
On the other hand, if the points on offer are industrialized, transactional or predictable, it quickly dehumanizes us into profit-seeking automatons. But at scale, this sort of easily communicated metric is common.
The word ‘jerk’ describes what happens to a human who is controlled by an assembly line (or a horse by a whip). A visitor to the first Ford assembly line was amazed at how the stopwatch and the pursuit of humans-as-a-resource mindset was turning people into puppets.
Once you decide to write a book about strategy, it raises the bar for having a strategy for the launch.
People generally focus far too much on the launch of a project. Rocketships need a perfect launch, because just about everything after the launch is simply ballistic. But most of us don’t work at Cape Canaveral.
The world of books is a metaphor for a lot of industries, where old methods aren’t working well but persist in sticking around. First-time authors are often pushed into a cycle of hustle and scarcity, which leads to burnout and disappointment.
The alternative isn’t easy, but it’s worth embracing. It can be effective in more than just a book launch.
Celebrate the true fans
The seductive promise of the book industry (or movies, or fashion, or any business that has “star maker machinery”) is that they will somehow introduce your idea to strangers.
It certainly worked for JD Salinger and even Joni Mitchell. But it hardly works that way now.
This is Strategy had a great launch, perhaps the most successful book I’ve done in years, because 1,000 people showed up first and made a difference. This opened the door for others who wanted to be part of the conversation.
In their rush to reach strangers, traditional publishers ignore the opportunity to dance with people who are already excited. In my case, thanks to purple.space and the loyal readers of this blog, there were folks eager to offer me the benefit of the doubt.
Creating the launch package, with seven books, the collectible (and delicious) chocolate and the powerful strategy deck (check them out) gave this group of magical people first dibs on something special, as well as a chance to share it.
The first step to publishing a book well begins long before you decide to write a book.
Create the scaffolding for the idea to spread
Books aren’t unique, but the math is particularly compelling: They never achieve any of their useful goals in the first week. A network TV show used to get all of its viewers the first and only time it ran. A book, on the other hand, is worth writing if people are reading and talking about it years later.
The launch is a chance to model that behavior. If the launch simply focuses on getting the word out, it’s likely that the word will fade over time. But, if people talk to one another as part of what you’re doing, they’re more likely to continue to do so.
Last week, in hundreds of cities around the world, readers came together to talk about strategy. Not about my book, but about their strategy and how they can improve it. More than eighty bookstores stepped up to volunteer their spaces, and the book became a catalyst for conversation. Getting a copy wasn’t the point–talking about the work to be done was.
Ignore false proxies
How many people liked that post on Instagram? How did the book rank on the Times list? What did the first reviewers have to say?
It’s so easy to see, tempting to manipulate, and, ultimately, pointless. The proxy of the Times list has been so manipulated that it’s now meaningless–and the work publishers and authors put into shifting their efforts into this antiquated measurement is distracting and ultimately wasted.
A false proxy is convenient, vivid and unhelpful. It’s like asking a programmer how many words per minute they can type. It might be useful to be a fast typist, but it doesn’t help you become a great programmer.
Normalize the idea
I did more than 80 podcasts that launched last week. (I’m grateful for the passionate people that power this medium, and delighted by the magic of our conversations). That might seem like a way to get the word out to promote a book, but that’s not really what’s happening. People don’t usually hear a podcast and then open their phones to buy a book.
Instead, a book is a chance to have a conversation. The conversation is the product, the book is just the catalyst.
When an author and publisher spend the time and effort to produce a book, they’re actually demonstrating a commitment and sending a signal that this is worth talking about. The conversations I did, though exhausting, were a foundation for the conversations I hope that others will have going forward.
Successful non-fiction books are now a souvenir of an idea that is spreading and worth understanding.
Abundance instead of scarcity
For four hundred years, the only way to get a book on a store’s bookshelves was for some other book to come off the shelf. There wasn’t enough room for it to be any other way.
Now, with online shopping and digital formats, there’s infinite shelf space. It’s “and” instead of “or.”
That’s one reason why the launch matters so much less than it used to–it’s not a useful proxy for shelf space any longer.
My publisher understands the new math. Instead of focusing on limited access and short-term measurements, the posture is to be promiscuous with the ideas and to weave together communities of practice and interest. The magic of an idea is that if I share it with you, we both have it.
My launch partner on the audiobook has a similar mindset. While the default online marketplace model is to hold search hostage, keeping a huge share of the proceeds in exchange for offering a scarce slot in their store, there are new options. Discovery doesn’t just happen in the online store’s search box. Since most of the readers seeking the book in the early days already know my work and can find this page, I can bypass this scarce resource and offer a reader and author-friendly alternative.
Abundance is generative, and it also gives us room for gratitude. The acknowledgments of a book are my favorite part to write, because so many people, people not mentioned on the cover, are involved in producing and delivering an idea of value. I don’t get to list all the readers, of course, or the people they talk to about the book, and that’s the real point of this post, and the book itself.
If you want to change a system, change the culture. And if you want to change the culture, it helps to create the conditions for people to step up, talk about it, and take action.
Periods were an extraordinary invention. It took thousands of years of writing before we settled on this simple convention.
The most direct way to improve your writing is to make your sentences shorter.
I was reading a magazine article yesterday and was rapidly losing interest. The topic appealed to me, but I couldn’t keep reading. Then I noticed that halfway through the first column, I was still on the same sentence.
We have trouble keeping that long a string in our heads at once.
Most immediately, you are the ancestor of the you of tomorrow.
That’s why we don’t spend every penny in our bank account, why we put leftovers in the fridge, why we earn a degree–it’s a gift to the you of tomorrow.
Each of us have a way of thinking about our ancestorhood.
The circle of now is how far into the future you’re hoping to make an impact. Do you care enough to invest in a thousand tomorrows? What will you invest in (or sacrifice, depending on your point of view) to receive in the future?
And the circle of us is how many people you’re considering in the actions you take today.
The most convenient, easiest and visceral choice is to make no choice at all. Keep your circles small, focused on pleasure and the short-term win. If we don’t think about it, this is what we might collide with. No friend at all to our descendants, including our future self.
When we’re at our best, though, we expand those circles, creating generative possibility for ourselves and those around us. Everyone feeds their circles, the opportunity is to make them bigger.
Sometimes, marketers, musicians or speakers dig themselves into a solipsistic rabbit hole.
They’ve heard their stuff before. They think everyone else has too.
So they bury the lede, look for new laughs and most of all, try to avoid boring themselves.
Which often leads to confusion or controversy or, most of all, a muddy message.
You’re not speaking up to entertain yourself. You’re here to teach the next group of people who need to hear from you.
Empathy in communication requires you to repeat the stuff that works as you continue to explore the next layer of what might work even better.
In the words of my late friend Jay Levinson, “Don’t change your story when you’re bored, or when your partner is bored, or when your team is bored. Change your story when your accountant is bored.”
Some problems are easy to solve, others are difficult, requiring a lot more labor, willpower, resources and coordination.
Some problems have simple solutions, while others are complex in what it takes to move forward.
The trivial problems are fun. They’re simple to solve and don’t require much effort. Yes, please, go solve them.
We’re tempted to focus on the problems that are complicated but apparently easy. Somehow, a tweet or a scientific paper or some other announcement is all that it will take to unknot this situation. Tempting, but unlikely. If all it took to solve an easy problem was telling people the solution, we probably would have solved it already.
The other temptation is to seek out problems that are difficult to solve and complicated to organize around. After all, a herculean problem like this is so hard that no one can fault you if you don’t succeed.
What truly matters, though, are the important problems. The ones that aren’t rocket science, but need a significant amount of guts, emotional labor and community coordination to solve. They’re here. Right in front of us. Simple but difficult. But worth it.
In 1983, an old article from the Harvard Business Review changed my life.
In 1960, Ted Levitt, a professor at HBS, wrote the most popular article in the Review’s history. Called Marketing Myopia, it described a different way of thinking about change and marketing.
I was a (very) young MBA student at Stanford and somehow got an interview for a summer job working as the assistant to Jim Levy, the CEO of Activision. At the time, they were the fastest-growing company in the history of the world.
Instead of meekly sharing my resume, I went in brandishing a copy of Levitt and HBR. I explained, with confidence, that Activision might be the Penn Central of their time, and they needed to be strategic in their approach to the market, broadening their focus away from the Atari console that accounted for what felt like 98% of their revenue.
He stood up to throw me out of his office. “Well, so much for that,” I thought.
At that moment, one of his VPs ran in with the Cashbox magazine bestseller list. Activision had 9 of the top 10 bestselling titles. The two of them ran down the hall to celebrate.
An hour later, Jim returned to his office, saw I was still sitting there, forgot why he was angry with me and offered me a summer job, one I ended up not taking. It didn’t matter, though, because I had seen the light.
I think Ted put his finger on something urgently important, and the lesson of the paper has stuck with me throughout my career.
This week, forty years in the making, Harvard published an edited version of my expansion of his idea, called strategy myopia.
I hope Ted would be pleased.
Strategy myopia is task focused. It’s based on a desire to get a guaranteed result for specified effort. It involves meetings and plans and powerpoints. Strategy myopia afflicts people who prioritize tactics over the hard work of finding a worthwhile strategy in the first place.
We can avoid it, but first we have to acknowledge it and discuss it.
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