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

by Seth Godin

systems build a bridge between today and tomorrow.

Our strategy is to use systems, alter systems, and build systems that expand our circles in ways each of us couldn’t do on our own.

A simple way to see time is to think about launching a podcast. Who would be the best guest you could imagine? Michelle Obama, Elvis Costello or Atul Gawande are the sort of home run interviews that podcasters dream of. But of course, none of these folks is eager to appear on your new podcast. Who would be the guest just before them? Which person, if they had a good experience on your show, would make it really likely that your dream guest would say yes? And so we work backwards, beginning with the end in mind. Which guest makes it likely we can welcome the guest who would open the door to our dream guest? Unfurl it all the way backward, without skipping steps, until you’ve reached your brother-in-law or next door neighbor.

Strategy is a flexible plan that guides us as we seek to create a change. It helps us make decisions over time while working within a system.

Strategy is interesting because of the complexity of its two companions: time and systems.

A key aspect of strategic planning is understanding opportunity costs, which are the benefits foregone by choosing one option over another.

Strategy demands humility, because accurately predicting the future is impossible.

Successful people figure out how to trade their time and their effort for the change they seek to make in the world.

For each of us, our strategy lives in four dimensions. It’s not simply a drawing of what we are hoping for. It includes time and interactions as well: step and response, call and repeat, trial and improvement.

The truth section describes the world as it is. Footnote it if you want to, but tell us about the market you are entering, the needs that already exist, the competitors in your space, technology standards, the way others have succeeded and failed in the past. The more specific the better. The more ground knowledge the better. The more visceral the stories the better. Do you see the system? The point of this section is to be sure that you’re clear about the way you see the world and that you and I agree on your assumptions. This section isn’t partisan. It takes no positions and simply states how things are. If you’re not talking about systems and the status quo in your truth section, it’s incomplete. Truth can take as long as you need to tell it. It can include spreadsheets, market share analysis, and anything I need to know about how the world works. We shouldn’t disagree about anything in the truth section.

The assertions section is your chance to describe how you’re going to change things. We will do X, and then Y will happen. We will build Z with this much money in this much time. We will present Q to the market and the market will respond by taking this action. In this section, share your business model. The tension you’re going to create. The scaffolding you will build. This is the heart of the modern business plan. The only reason to launch a project is to change something, and I want to know what you’re going to do and what impact it’s going to have.

You will make assertions that won’t pan out. You’ll miss budgets and deadlines and sales. So the alternatives section tells me what you’ll do if that happens. How much flexibility does your product or t...

The people section rightly highlights the key element—who is on your team and who is going to join your team. Who doesn’t mean their résumé. Instead, talk about their attitudes and abilities. Strip away the false proxies and labels and instea...

The next section is all about money. Because projects = money + time. How much do you need, how will you spend it, what does cash flow look like, P&Ls, balance sheets, margins ...

Finally, for emphasis, time. What will be different a week or a month or a year after you launch? How will the unseen axis of time inform your planni...

Intuition is Strategy Without Narrative

A Formula 1 race car is very likely to win on the track, but will fail a hundred times if you try to run errands with it. Leverage makes us brittle.

The secret of successful product development isn’t an innovation that bursts forth as a polished and finished product. Instead, it’s sticking with something that is almost useless and nurturing, sharing, and improving it until we can’t imagine living without it.

People who are finding traction rarely feel burned out. Burnout comes when our goals don’t align with our strategy.

Trying to be in two moments at once—today and the future we’re wishing for—is exhausting. An effective strategy helps us bridge the two.

The sperm whale wasn’t saved by a publicity campaign or people voluntarily cutting back on light. It was saved by the development of kerosene lanterns and then the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania. The system didn’t want to kill all the whales. All the system wanted was to make a profit by solving the problem of darkness. When it found a cheaper and more efficient way to do that, it did.

It’s tempting to be a market pioneer—to be the one who shows up with the first charge card, the first personal training firm, or the first home computer. But it’s a challenging road. It can be thrilling work, but because creators focus on needs and not markets, they often fail to account for how difficult it is to activate those needs and turn them into a thriving market if one doesn’t exist yet. If you’re in market-creation mode, it helps to call it that and be prepared for how difficult it might be.

Culture defeats tactics every time, which is why strategy is often about creating culture.

The future is an unvisited city, but we can see it from a distance

The focus of strategic thinking begins with “What’s it for?”

Strategy always involves a delay. We need to do something non-obvious or un-fun now so we can get the result we seek later.

When the person you could have been meets the person you are becoming, is it going to be a cause for celebration or heartbreak?

Too often, our approach to our work is to view it as a repeated chance to buy a very low-odds lottery ticket. This approach is always outperformed in the long run by consistent and persistent strategic work.

Nostalgia for the future is that very same feeling about things that haven’t happened yet. We are prepared for them to happen, but if something comes along to change our future, those things won’t happen, and we’ll be disappointed.

Instead of attachment and a relentless addiction to one and only one outcome, we can develop a resilient strategy that helps us build the future we seek to live in.

When we’re doing our job, there’s a checklist. Instructions. Deniability. Sooner or later we have to do our jobs, but it probably pays to focus on our work. Our work makes change happen. Our work is up to us. Our work is a series of choices that lead to the jobs we spend our hours on. Our work is our responsibility and our opportunity. Our job requires answering questions. Our work gives us a chance to ask them.

The work is to figure out which job we actually want.

After they defeated Blockbuster and had the market to themselves, Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos made a strategic decision to shift the future of the company to streaming movies and original programming. And they communicated this commitment in a very simple way: They stopped inviting the DVD leadership team to meetings. Even though DVD rentals were all of their profit and most of their revenue, they knew that having these powerful voices in the room would ultimately lead to compromises designed to defend that line of business. Our next move is often something that decreases the value of our previously hard-won assets.

Cutting out the 80% to go all in on the 20%, in “10x is Easier Than 2x” terms

A foundation of our blueprint is acknowledging which judges we are prepared to choose, and which wannabe judges we’re eager to ignore.

The flower wants bees to visit and berries want to be eaten by birds. Obviously they don’t have conscious intent, but this “desire” guides their progression through the generations. When they get more of what they want, it happens more.

In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly helped me see that the easiest way to understand how technology is changing our world is to imagine that it’s another species evolving to fill and expand its niche.

I’m not sure I completely buy into Stanford Beer’s heuristic, “The purpose of a system is what it does.” The weather is a system, but rain is not the purpose of the system. It doesn’t actually have a purpose, not in the way we usually use the term. The weather isn’t trying to do anything. It simply is.

It might be more accurate to say, “The system is what the system does.”

No matter how much the marketplace economy creates, invents, and sells, there remains an insatiable desire for some wants, things we can never get enough of. The nexus of all of these desires is money. Money in itself is nothing, but the story of money means that it is a proxy for many things.

Time isn’t something we can see directly. It’s simply the change in snapshots over time. Just as a river is a lake with a current, a strategy is only possible when we consider time. As time moves forward, we find different conditions, different options, and different challenges. Our strategy is the narrative for how we will engage with our project over time.

The first group are early adopters, not adapters. They’re eager. They’re looking for something new. Their role in the system is to bring innovation, and they gain status and satisfaction by looking for something better. This is less than 3% of the population. That means that when you bring something new to the world, 97% of the folks you interact with will not embrace it. The folks at the far end of the curve are adapters. They fight change. It’s a threat to them. Adapters have plenty of objections, but what they’re really saying is, “I’m afraid.”

Anthony Iannarino teaches that that the job of a sales team isn’t to persuade people to buy from us. It’s to find the people who WANT to try something new, and to politely and eagerly send everyone else on their way.

The job of the marketer is to make something so remarkable that this tiny group of adopters can’t stop telling their peers. They’re the ones that get the word out, not you. This phenomenon has been clear f...

In 1995, Jackie Fenn developed the Gartner Hype Cycle.

Systems problems demand systems solutions, and we cross the chasm when we create the conditions for the defenders of the status quo to eagerly embrace our movement.

Lev Vygotsky described scaffolding a hundred years ago in his work on child development and learning. He introduced the concept of the “Zone of Proximal Development” (ZPD). The ZPD refers to the distance between what an individual can do without help and what they can do with guidance and encouragement from a skilled partner. It’s much easier to ride a bike if someone on Rollerblades is scooting along beside you, holding the handlebars. A few hours later, you can’t remember ever not knowing how to ride.

If you seek to make systems change and you haven’t built the scaffolding for others to join you, it’s unlikely you’ll succeed.

Author adrienne maree brown encourages us to move at the speed of trust. Critical connections are more important than critical mass. The next step isn’t to host a huge rally. It’s to create the conditions for just enough people to come back again and again and again, forming the nucleus for real change.

If you succeed in creating cohorts around the change your project makes, it’s possible that the early adopters will talk to their friends and colleagues. These are the early majority, the regular folks, the people who aren’t seeking change or novelty, but simply want something that works better. If you treat this group like the innovators, you’ll fail.

Useful early criticism is grounded in an understanding of time. “This tree is too small” isn’t helpful, because the gardener already knows the tree is going to grow. Useful advice accepts that time will do its work. The creator knows that. The real question is: How do we make the spec better?