Strategy: Choosing Where Not to Compete

Ask ten executives what their strategy is, and most will hand you a list. More markets, more products, more hires, more revenue. It reads like ambition, and it is very nearly the opposite of strategy, because a list of everything you want is a confession that you have not yet decided what you will not do.

Strategy is subtraction before it is anything else. It is the discipline of choosing what to leave on the table, so that the few decisions that actually move the enterprise are not buried under the many that merely fill the calendar. Most organizations do not fail for lack of effort. They fail for lack of focus.

Choose where not to compete

In Blue Ocean Strategy, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne draw a distinction worth carrying into every planning meeting. There are “red oceans,” where rivals thrash over the same shrinking pool of demand until the water turns the color the name suggests. And there are “blue oceans,” uncontested space created by offering value the market is not yet asking for. The instinct under pressure is always to compete harder. The wiser move is often to compete somewhere else.

A real strategy has a spine

Richard Rumelt calls most corporate strategy what it usually is: a wish list with a budget attached. A real one, he argues, has three parts that hold each other up. An honest diagnosis of the challenge you actually face. A guiding policy for meeting it. And a coherent set of actions that follow from both. Skip the diagnosis — the uncomfortable, specific naming of what is truly in your way — and everything downstream is guesswork in a nicer font.

Strategy is a long game

Here is the part the frameworks undersell. Strategy is executed over years, not quarters, and the organizations that arrive are rarely the ones that set out with the boldest plan. They are the ones that held a clear destination while revising the route relentlessly — trimming the sails as the winds shifted, without ever confusing the sails for the port. The plan will change. The place you are going should not.

Drawing on W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne (Blue Ocean Strategy); Richard Rumelt (Good Strategy / Bad Strategy); Michael Porter on competitive advantage; and A.G. Lafley & Roger Martin (Playing to Win).