This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life)

by Seth Godin

The Secretary of State has a problem as well. The US State Department is one of the largest organizations in the world, with countless staff and a huge budget. How to put them to work to make the desired impact in more than 150 countries?

To find a better strategy, we need to be prepared to walk away from the one we’ve defaulted into.

My narrative is recursive and elliptical, circling back on itself as it seeks to help you see how time, games, systems, and empathy dance together to make our world. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Confronted with so much choice, it’s tempting to just do your job. To pretend that it’s up to someone else, and to put your head down and follow instructions. Don’t surrender your agency and revert to the numbing day-to-day grind of compliance. You can make things better.

Elegance is simplicity, efficiency, and effectiveness. It’s not only a solution that gets a result. It’s arguably a better solution—the least complex and clearest way forward. An elegant strategy offers leverage in service of the change we seek. While it might seem effortless in execution, creating the method requires insight and care.

Systems Deliver Value

A corporate bureaucracy is a built system, but it’s also a complex one. It acts in ways that no one, especially those in the HR department, could have predicted. Complex systems create unexpected and unpredictable outputs. They’re probabilistic and unstable, not deterministic the way we expect.

It’s almost impossible to rank something as diverse as educational institutions, but they did it anyway.

All other things being equal (and they were), the houses with visible meters used one-third less electricity than their neighbors.

If you want to grow a garden, you’ll need to plant seeds, but it’s the ecosystem and the climate that will determine what happens after that.

Strategy is the hard work of choosing what to do today to improve our tomorrow.

We’re not born with a specific passion, it is produced based on what we encounter and what’s expected, even if we can’t put the strategy into words.

The hard work of developing a better, more resilient strategy begins with letting go of the assumptions and goals you might be holding on to right now. “Simplify, then add lightness,” said Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus Cars. Simplify because the needless complexity we’re stuck with was only created to insulate us from fear. And lightness because our agility increases resilience.

As Michael Porter has pointed out, a strategy isn’t a goal. And a strategy isn’t a list of tasks. A strategy is the set of choices we make (and stick with) as we seek to compete. Hard choices are easy to hide from, since choices feel risky. And competition is challenging. It’s easier to have a meeting about our mission statement than it is to get serious about choosing and persisting with a strategy.

Fewer than one in twenty people are admitted into Stanford as undergrads. If you get in, you haven’t proven them wrong or beaten the odds—they

let someone in and it was you. Strategy involves the hard work of looking at probabilities and building likely outcomes into your plans. It might not be in our control, but we can still count the cards.

The other group, the one that successful makers of change can lean on, are individuals who understand strategy. They have domain knowledge, they can ask hard questions, and they’re eager to criticize the work (not the worker).

These coaches don’t have to have played to be successful. But they need to have seen enough games and called enough plays to have domain expertise and the discernment to understand what plays to call.

They’re not always right, but their feedback should be interesting. This group can ask challenging questions that ca...

Someone who buys a Ferrari or an Android phone or a stinky bleu cheese isn’t stupid. They’ve simply made different choices than someone who buys an electric car, an iPhone, or a cashew-based cheddar. The magic of positioning is that it respectfully highlights what the choices might be. The extreme ends of each axis might not be something you would want, but it must be something some people would want. When you honestly and accurately position the competition, they cease to become your competition, because you sell something that they don’t sell.

Moving your competition to the center—the catch basin of mediocrity—is a powerful strategy.

Successful positions work because they have empathy for people, not because they represent a universal sort of better.

respecting. Your successful competition stands for something. When you choose to stand for something that contrasts with that, they can’t follow you.

Don’t run out of money, and don’t run out of time.

Steve McConnell shares the most important lesson about project management: Changing course and exploring your options are far cheaper at the start than they are at the end. While this is obvious, we almost always do it backward. It’s only toward the end that the boss takes a look, that the community review board gets involved, that we share our idea with the salesforce—because it’s at the end that things begin to feel real and imminent, and busy and important and distracted people have trouble paying attention when they have competing emergencies.

Of course, the task we put off will marinate for exactly long enough to become a crisis, and then we’ll get to it. Which means that our days are spent in crisis, working on anything and everything only at the last minute.

One reason that we avoid choosing a strategy is that we’re not comfortable walking away from all the other possible strategies. Rather than celebrate the paths not taken, we take no path at all.

The question isn’t: “How is it going?” It’s: “Compared to what?” This time, effort, or money you’re spending—what could it have gone to instead?

As Sasha Dichter says, “Tell everyone about your strategy.” Tactics shift, but strategies are for the long-haul.

Brick by brick, day by day.

Don’t run out of time, don’t run out of money. Hard decisions now ensure easier decisions tomorrow.

The opportunity isn’t to de-risk our work. The opportunity is to see the risks, understand the game, and build our expectations and responses about risk into the project. Risk is the price we pay to make a difference.

Constraints are a gift because they bring us something to lean against, and they give us the chance to focus. Sometimes, the situation changes, and constraints are lifted. In those moments, we need to be hyper-aware of the new possibilities. The rest of the time, instead of cursing the boundaries, we can celebrate them. The most interesting strategies happen at the edges, and the edges exist because that’s where the constraints are.

Celebrate the problems ahead. Problems are opportunities to create the conditions for better outcomes.

A more useful approach is to seek out and embrace optionality. If we can try something, experience something, or launch something that comes with an undo button, that path is far more resilient than irrevocable decisions that can’t be undone.

If you’re planning a flight that requires a connection, choose to connect at an airport that has lots of flights that get near to your destination. That way, if your flight is canceled, you have alternatives. These all make sense, but how often do we consciously seek out optionality?

The tension and stress of talking about a decision before we make it is real. Yet it’s far less than the tension and stress that goes with living with a poor decision we made yesterday.

Look closely at any successful strategy, and you’ll see bad outcomes occur more often than we would imagine. Strategies require decisions, and decisions are about the future. Predicting the future in a complex system is an unreliable venture. As a result, unexpected, unpredicted outcomes are the norm. It’s worth calling it what it is: luck. Resilient strategies accept and account for luck. They benefit from good luck and are resilient enough to survive bad luck.

Don’t get caught confusing money with security.

The insatiable need for more money is directly (and ironically) related to not being clear about what will ultimately bring security.

Learning how to think about money, though, usually does.

Another is to be clear about Maximax vs. Maximin. Maximax is the strategy of seeking to maximize the impact of your wins. This is the entertainment business, where it doesn’t matter if you have occasional flops—what matters is focusing on increasing the scale and impact of your hits. The alternative is to focus on Maximin. Minimize the impact of your losses. This is the way a power plant works. It’s nice if your average productivity goes up a bit, but it’s absolutely terrible if something goes wrong and the place melts down.

We tend to default to Maximin, playing it safe and avoiding any short-term losses. But there are places where we should lean into Maximax, being careful not to completely blow it, but embracing small losses as we seek to maximize the benefits of our wins. This is always a choice. There are very few decisions that offer both.

We have to acknowledge and take responsibility for the potential consequences of our decisions, both positive and negative.

A good decision is simply the best analysis of the existing information.

Good decisions are worth making, even if they don’t always lead to good outcomes.

But that’s simply because the only people who are there are doing pretty well. What you’re not seeing are the folks who went broke, burned out, or walked away.

The utility of a strategy is not measured by how many people used it successfully. It’s measured by what percentage of the folks who used it succeeded.

When we make decisions, we have to ignore random noise that we call luck, but pay particular attention to systems where winners are rewarded with the conditions that make them more likely to win again.

It’s not much of a decision for a lawyer to incorporate his client’s company in Delaware. That’s what everyone does. The passive non-decision can be a trap that reinforces negative systemic outputs. The fear of confronting sunk costs can keep us stuck doing the wrong things.