If you are comfortable with your strategy, you may not be making very good strategy

The new issue of Harvard Business Review has a good article about how strategy-making
should feel. Usually I am
wary of applying business lessons to military operations, but I do think that
the business world knows a lot about strategy because its leaders have to think
about it every day, while a military leader can slide by for decades without
having to think seriously about it -- or to have his lack of thinking tested by
reality.

Basically, making
strategy should not feel good, avers Roger L. Martin. (The article is titled "The Big Lie of
Strategic Planning," but I don't think that really captures what it is really
about.)

"Fear and discomfort are an essential part of
strategy making," he writes. "In fact, if you are entirely comfortable with
your strategy, there's a strong chance it isn't very good.... You need to be
uncomfortable and apprehensive: True strategy is about placing bets and making
hard choices. The objective is not to eliminate risk but to increase the odds
of success." Indeed, if there is not much risk, there probably isn't much
strategy, he emphasizes: "Strategy involves a bet."

But, you say, you've written strategy documents, and you felt
just fine? Martin suggests that you probably were actually mistaking planning
for strategy. "A common trap," he soothes.

Another insight:
The better your strategy, the shorter it likely will be. "There is no reason
why a company's strategy choices can't be summarized in one page with simple
words and concepts." (Indeed, U.S. strategy in World War II didn't even take up a page.)

The article
reminded me a bit of Michael Porter's classic admonition that, "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do." Speaking of that approach, there
is a good essay to be written by someone applying that thought to President
Obama's foreign policy: The essence of his administration may be in what it
chose not to do. That's not a bad thing -- I think the same was true of
President Eisenhower's administration. For example, Ike's rejection of the
recommendation of the majority of the Joint Chiefs that he nuke Vietnam. He
wasn't against using nukes, he just thought that ground forces would inevitably
follow, and he was determined not to get involved in another land war on the
periphery of the Communist bloc.