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

by Seth Godin

When organizations large and small ask me about marketing problems, I often respond by saying, “you probably need a strategy first.” But what’s that? Strategy is difficult to see and not easy to talk about, because it happens over time. To find a better strategy, we need to be prepared to walk away from the one we’ve defaulted into.

Who will we become, who will we be of service to, and who will they help others to become This is strategy.

A strategy isn’t a map—it’s a compass. Strategy is a better plan. It’s the hard work of choosing what to do today to make tomorrow better.

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.

Pretending we don’t need a strategy isn’t nearly as useful as digging deep to find an elegant one. Elegant strategies use systems. Even when they set out to change the system, they don’t fight it directly but use the system as a tool to change the system.

Three things to focus on: • The strategy gets better as you grow. Anyone can sprint, but elegant strategies are something that you can maintain.

Systemic advantage defeats heroic effort.

They’re simple to explain and difficult to stick to.

It’s difficult to strategize and make a difference if you don’t understand the systems that are working to keep things as they are.

Systems are everywhere humans engage to fill a need. Sometimes they persist longer than we’d like. Sometimes they move in directions we don’t appreciate. Often, they’re cultural, invisible, and hard to notice. But systems define our lives.

Affiliation—culture is “people like us do things like this.”

And then Amazon wove it all together. Which explains how I can buy a pair of Shokz underwater MP3 headphones online and get them delivered to my home the next day—for the equivalent of $2 in Wedgwood’s time.

DNA tests, passports, digital surveillance, rankings, membership lists, and SAT scores are all transformative because they surface data and turn it into information. Information changes systems.

culture is the driver of most systems, and culture is the result of the interactions between and among people. Strategies stumble when they depend on someone with power dictating how things will occur.

A game has the following elements: players, rules, scarcity, choices, feedback loops, and outcomes.

We often spend more time figuring out how to win the game we’re in instead of choosing which game to play in the first place.

when we are at our best, we actually create our future with intent. The future counts on us to make it better. Strategy is the hard work of choosing what to do today to improve our tomorrow.

A series of 17 questions shines a light on the work to be done. It brings tomorrow forward to today, right here and right now, allowing us to articulate a strategy. • Who are we here to serve? • What is the change we seek to make? • What are our resources? • What is the genre we’re working in? • Who has done something like this before me? • What systems are in play? • Am I changing someone’s status? • Why would anyone voluntarily choose to be part of this work? • What will they tell their colleagues? • Who gains in status, affiliation and power by supporting this work? • Will early support translate into more support later? • Where is the network effect? • What do I need to learn to make this work? • Who do I need to work with? • Where is the dip and when should I quit? • What will I do if it doesn’t work out? • How much is enough?

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,”

“Simple” doesn’t mean that you’re making a smaller impact or settling for less. It means choosing a strategy that puts you on the hook. It’s a chance to be a meaningful specific, not a wandering generality.

any project worth doing might not work. And what if it does work? Are we willing to let go of our status quo enough to embrace the possibility that we might make an impact? Are we ready to become whoever we will be if the strategy succeeds?

A strategy is the set of choices we make (and stick with) as we seek to compete.

emotional labor is the work of change, decision-making, and strategy. It is the difficult work of embracing incompetence as we learn new skills, and the challenging work of seeing and then implementing real change. This is easy to avoid, which is one reason we spend so much time on chores and tasks.

Strategy is a compass that helps us to take action when we’re uncertain, to build networks when we’re alone, and to persevere until the world we live in becomes the world we imagine.

Her blueprint can’t be the blueprint for the next competitor because the world keeps changing. One can copy the leader, but if the leader has deep roots and continues to plant new seeds, following will always be difficult.

We can no longer market to the anonymous masses. They’re not anonymous and they’re not masses. You can only market to people who are willing participants, like this group of ten.

Every strategy depends on being conscious of the change we seek to make and the systems that can amplify or impede our progress.

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.

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. Strategy also involves anticipating and planning for the actions and reactions of other actors within the system. This means considering not only the direct effects of strategic choices but also the indirect effects that come from the responses of competitors, customers, and even the environment.

If I want the real truth about a business and where it’s going, I’d divide the modern business plan into six sections: 1. Truth 2. Assertions 3. Alternatives 4. People 5. Money 6. Time The truth section describes the world as it is.

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.

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 team have?

The people section rightly highlights the key element—who is on your team and who is going to join your team.

The next section is all about money. Because projects = money + time.

What matters is customer traction. Not everyone, someone.

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. The goal at the start is traction with a few, not perfection for the masses.

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

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.

Too often, strategic conversations are used to amplify resistance and to push us to take no action.

it embraces the fact that we succeed when we commit to culture change instead of first aid. Culture defeats tactics every time, which is why strategy is often about creating culture.

The first step is seeing the system, and the second step is to commit to a strategy for change. Our blueprint begins with three questions: • Who is it for? • What is it for? • What is the system?

the most compelling strategies come from systems and the culture, not from someone in charge.

Marketing is the art of building a product or service that tells a story. A true story—one that resonates and changes the person who experiences it. The first job of the marketer is to find a problem and to solve it, helping the customer get to where they are going. And the second, which (from a marketing perspective) is ultimately more important than the first, is to give that person a story to tell others.

The strategy we adopt has tension at its center. We’re not here to “do our job.” We’re here to make a change happen.

Our next move is often something that decreases the value of our previously hard-won assets.

You’re spending your time whether you realize it or not. And without a strategy, the time you spent is wasted.

The typical corporation doesn’t transform its customers. It enriches its executives. The transformation is an occasional side effect.

Culture is the enforcement dynamic of resilient systems, and culture is the way things are around here.

Creating tomorrow by repeating yesterday is not a useful way forward.

Every strategy requires choices. And those choices often involve saying “no” to things we could do, but won’t do. • We will turn away customers. • We will avoid some opportunities. • We will focus on one thing at the expense of another.