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

by Seth Godin

McKinsey has billions in revenue, serving any large organization that can afford them. As a result, they’ve been involved with antisocial projects, including coming up with strategies to help Purdue get people addicted to opioids.

A competitor like BCG or Bain could announce that they are only going to take ethical clients. Hiring them would send a signal. Many clients might choose the benefits that come from being good enough to have a clean consulting firm working for them.

If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over? • Is this objective really what you want? • Do your assets match the project you’ve taken on? • Why would the nodes in the system you’re engaging with care enough to listen to you or take action? • What will they tell their colleagues and friends?

The process is simple but easy to forget: overwhelm the smallest viable audience with a solution that creates the conditions for them to take action. Repeat.

Successful Projects • They aren’t static because they move through time and time moves through them. • They accomplish something. • They serve systems and enable their participants to get to where they’re going. • They create the conditions for people to spread an idea. • They create resilient structures that thrive when the world changes. • They evolve based on useful inputs.

If we say, “Failure is not an option,” we’ve just guaranteed that success can’t happen either. Certainty is elusive, and if we require certainty to move forward, we’re trapped.

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.

What Do You Make? • A living • A time sheet • Digital buckets of bits • A widget • Projects • A community • A difference • Change • A ruckus • Choices • A commitment • Decisions Does the way you spend time and money and effort support your answer?

Russ Ackoff’s writing about systems asserts that problems have five components: • A decision-maker • Elements of the situation that are controllable by the decision-maker • Elements which are out of the decision-maker’s control • Constraints • A range of possible outcomes When all five are present, we get to do our work. The work of making a decision.

Don’t focus on a situation, which is not a problem at all. A situation is a mismatch of constraints and goals. A situation becomes a problem when we have the agency to change something and move forward.

If the project is not working, find a new objective. Make better decisions. Build new assets. And avoid trying to control elements that can’t possibly be changed.

There’s a difference between a good decision and a good outcome.

if you buy a lottery ticket and actually win the lottery, it feels like you made a good decision. You didn’t. You made a bad decision and got lucky—a bad choice with a good outcome. The flip side is more often true: We correctly understood our options, made a choice, and our strategy didn’t succeed. That’s not a bad decision. That’s a good decision that was followed by a bad outcome.

Resilient strategies accept and account for luck. They benefit from good luck and are resilient enough to survive bad luck.

If money is an emotional issue for you, you’ve put your finger on a big part of the problem. No one who is good at building houses has an emotional problem with hammers. Place your emotional problems where they belong, and focus on seeing money as a tool.

The way you feel about giving money to good causes has a lot to do with the way you feel about money.

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.

Go to a conference of multilevel marketing distributors, NFT creators, or even stock market pickers, and you’ll come to the conclusion that these are reliable ways to make a living. After all, everyone in that room is doing pretty well. 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. During World War II, a lot of airplanes were shot down. The army hired Abraham Wald to inspect the planes that had made it back to base to suggest how they should increase their armor to improve their odds. The planes Wald reviewed had bullet holes throughout their wing area. The conventional approach was to add more armor there, where the holes were. He pointed out the counterintuitive truth: The fact that these planes made it safely home meant that the wings were fine. Put the armor where there weren’t holes, because the planes that got shot in the fuselage were the ones that never made it back. Another example: A company works hard to fix the things that lead customers to call in and complain. That’s fine, but it ignores the customers that aren’t bothering to call in but who are just walking away or badmouthing you to others. Figure out what those things are and you’ll make an even bigger impact on your long-term success. 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.

If the change you seek to make requires nuanced and brave decisions from people inclined to defend sunk costs, the road ahead is more difficult than it needs to be. Tamsen Webster points out that people rarely get “believer’s remorse.” Instead, they will do almost anything to defend their identity and the system they’re in.

The purpose of our culture isn’t to enable capitalism. Capitalism is here because it enables us to build the culture we choose to live in.

Leaded gas didn’t go away because car engineers came up with better engines. It went away because governments banned it.

A few years after his gasoline “innovation,” Midgely was back. He pioneered CFCs, a magical molecule that could power reliable and efficient refrigerators (for millions of homes, not to mention air conditioners) as well as making aerosols for spray paint and anti-perspirants easier to make. Unfortunately, each molecule of CFC released into the atmosphere changes the state of thousands of molecules of ozone, the layer of our atmosphere that protects us from direct sunlight, skin cancer, and the boiling of the Antarctic region. It took a few decades, but the nations of the world got together in Montreal and agreed to a protocol to ban CFCs. And yet, despite the ban, we still have working refrigerators and spray paint. The system figured out how to produce them without CFCs, and the ozone layer is healing,

despite the short-term resistance from some people who call themselves defenders of the free market. Without boundaries, the free market races to the bottom because it finds shortcuts and the competitive system we li...

We’ve been pushed to make our circles ever smaller. You’re encouraged to worry about just yourself and focus on the right now. This approach is counter to the truth of resilient and generative communities.

Studies show that detoxing from Facebook improves rational thinking and long-term happiness. Yet people still use it.

The subtitle of The Carbon Almanac is “It’s not too late.” As John Green wrote, “Despair isn’t very productive. That’s the problem with it. Like a replicating virus, all despair can make is more of itself.”

We can now see that systems problems demand systems solutions.

a classic and simple problem in economics: Externalities corrupt the workings of a free market.

Jet fuel is sold too cheap. The owner of the jet saves money, and everyone on the planet (and their descendants) pay for it. It’s estimated that we subsidized the price of oil products as much as SEVEN TRILLION dollars in 2023.

The top ten causes of climate change all exist because they are convenient and cheap, even though in the course of a decade or less, they will create the conditions for disaster, a disaster that won’t be convenient or cheap to remedy.

Any change worth making requires the focus and persistence to create community action. Systems and culture are far greater forces than any individual can overcome.

The future is actually many futures, and our future is not impervious to our actions. In fact, our actions (or inactions) are a cause of our future.

Soldiers marching across a bridge are trained to walk out of sync, because if they all marched as one, the coordinated force of their footsteps would cause the bridge to collapse. Of course, if you want to impact a system, this coordination is required.

When making a new decision, we must ignore what we acquired yesterday. The skills we earned, the machines we purchased, the privileges we were given—they are all gifts to you from the you of yesterday. Like all gifts, they’re optional. You don’t need to accept them or keep them around.

Here are questions worth asking about your project and your strategy: • Who is this project for? Who is my smallest viable audience? • What change do I seek to make with this project? • What is my strategy to make this change happen? Can I articulate it clearly? • What resources and assets do I have to dedicate to this project? Do I have enough kindling to burn this log? • What is my timeline for this project? When does it ship and what is my deadline for calling it quits? • What systems am I currently working within? Does the system want what I have to offer? • What systems would need to change for my project to succeed? How can I create the conditions for that change? • Where will I cause tension? What resistance should I anticipate from others (and myself)?

How big is my circle of us and circle of now? What can I do to expand them? What about my audience’s circles? • Why would someone talk about or recommend my project to others? • How can I create the conditions for a network effect to develop around my project?

Where are the feedback loops, and which ones move my work forward or slow it down? • Which games are being played? Who sets the rules? • Which games are winnable, which are oppositional? And which games don’t need to be won, simply played? • What can I learn to increase my odds of success? Where can I gain that knowledge?

Is the change I’m making contagious? How can I alter the culture I’m creating to make it more so? • How will early successes of my project make later successes more likely?

What metrics is the current system optimizing for? How could my strategy re-align incentives and feedback loops around different measures of success? • How does my project seek to shift part of the culture from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset?

You’ve always had what you needed to make a difference. But now you can see the systems, understand the games, and ask the questions to turn your project into work with impact. Persistently over time, person by person, day by day. Go make a ruckus.

A note on AI: I’m grateful for the editorial assistance of Claude, a new kind of large language model. All of this book is written by me, and I’m responsible for its content, but I regularly asked Claude to challenge my thinking. I was particularly pleased with how good it was at completing lists. At the start of the book, I encouraged you to challenge Claude with prompts and lists from this book, as it’s very good at reviewing your work and pointing out what doesn’t match the goals you’ve stated. If you’re hesitant about sharing your strategy with your peers, ask Claude first.