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

by Seth Godin

If you change what gets measured, you’ll change what gets done.

The smart strategy is to bet on change. How will the new system create opportunities for people brave enough to take them?

It’s not unusual for a TikTok video of an idea to reach 1,000 times as many people as a book might.

The most profitable brands overinvest in finding and confirming affiliation among their customers. People have a long history of trading money for belonging.

There are scarcity-based competitions in our culture that reward early success. Acknowledging this (however unfair or suboptimal it is as a sorting mechanism) informs how we think about our strategy.

Leverage in business works like this: Something is working, and you borrow some money to help it work louder, faster, or at more scale.

This leads to Schumpeter’s creative destruction. Any strategy, scaled big enough, cannot be sustained, and it will be replaced by a new set of conditions, players, and rules. In other words: Every successful organization will fail unless it becomes something different before it does.

Someone in a system can’t do something brave and powerful and new without telling their boss and their peers. If someone is going to make an unusual hiring decision, change a policy, or even buy from a new supplier, they’re exposing themselves to risk—a risk that the system amplifies, because the system’s stability is based on maintaining the status quo. The successful intervention pre-writes the story. It eliminates the unstated objection before it becomes a factor.

There are investments we can make to cause a change over time. Through design, productivity investments, and storytelling, we can find a long-term competitive advantage.

Trust leads to trust. Influence creates influence. The network effect is the dynamic of our time, and most of us don’t even notice it.

A smart strategy creates the conditions for a network effect, and the resulting exponential growth compounds into value—value for the creator of the network, but also value for the people who are part of it. Shawn Coyne explained that the author’s job is to sell the first 10,000 copies of a book, and then it’s the book’s job to sell the rest.

People only invite others to join a network if they benefit from doing so. If you don’t begin with a network effect as a significant benefit for users, it’s almost impossible to build it in later.

Culture defeats tactics, every time, and culture is the most resilient component of a system.

When we tell a different story about how to achieve the wants they already have, behaviors shift. Not via a revolution, but through a strategy and a story.

It’s easier to help someone find what they want than it is to change what they want.

Network effects are the enemy of substitution. If the popular choice works better because it’s popular, people are not eager to switch.

Feedback loops compound the small advantages of an early leader.

Sunk costs then arrive to further lock-in an incumbent against possible substitutes.

Status roles and affiliation are at the heart of social adhesion, and they’re the driving force behind many of the individual decisions that add up to creating cultural standards. Status roles are a measure of who’s up and who’s down.

people will pick the cheaper option any time that there isn’t substitution aversion or a desire for social adhesion. All other things being equal, we always choose the cheaper option. But things are almost never equal.

Seeking novelty is strange behavior, a symptom of becoming accustomed to wealth and safety.

Once the foundations for these systems are created, we build commerce around them, ensuring that they will stick around.

It might be helpful to imagine that we can choose a persona for our project and our work. Each is appropriate in some circumstances—the trap lies in wearing one of these hats and then hoping for the result that comes from a different one.

The insurgent: This project has enough speed, direction, and power to actually force the system to take notice.

The change agent: When the technology of production or communication fundamentally shifts, the existing system pretends it’s not happening, tries to fight it, and ultimately fails or changes.

The cobbler: This person does an important job in an existing system, and while not often paid fairly, toils away at their craft.

Fidei Defensor: The defender of the faith.

The innovator: Technology and insight are the most common and powerful ways to change a system.

The educator: Information is actually a measurable force of nature, as much as a rainstorm or a meteor. When information is shared and spread, the system shifts.

The maintainer and the optimizer: People who work within organizations often fit into these two roles.

No one is controlling the dice, but if we’re smart, we can choose a set of dice that are more likely to get us what we seek. Loaded dice and a stacked deck can be found if we look for them.

Strategy involves the hard work of looking at probabilities and building likely outcomes into your plans.

When the world is changing and we seek to change it, best practices fail. The alternative is to learn by analogy. In this instance, with these factors, an approach like this worked.

We benefit from finding two types of supporters we can seek out when we’re building our strategy. The first are people who bring enthusiasm and optimism to our journey.

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).

Positioning isn’t competitive. It’s the opposite. It turns your competitors into colleagues, folks who do something else for someone else.

“Everyone” is shorthand for hope and an unwillingness to see time, systems, and strategies. “Someone” is far more effective.

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? People with answers to these questions rarely end up with a marketing problem.

the better of creating lasting impact for a few people instead of seeking glancing recognition from the masses.

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.

One reason that we avoid choosing a strategy is that we’re not comfortable walking away from all the other possible strategies.

Like it or not, you have a project culture. What’s it like around here? Can we talk about it? We can begin by announcing that we have a project, describing our strategy, and articulating the change we seek to make.

as we add more people, complexity rises.

The larger the team, the more we need to lean into the process of communication. It begins by being clear about our roles, our purpose, the change we seek to make, and the people we’re seeking to serve. More than that, we need to create the conditions for this honest project-focused communication to continually occur without heroic effort. This is how buildings get built and movies get made—when our project culture is obvious and the proxies for progress and quality are clear, the work gets done.

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. If they’re not present, then we don’t have a problem or a decision to make. We simply have a situation. 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 there’s an easy and productive way to backtrack, the best response might be, “Sure, why not?”

When writing a business plan, write three business plans, completely different from each other. You’re going to pick one, but first you need to explore the options. In fact, it might pay to write three business plans knowing you’re going to pick one at random.

If you’ve got a job, a steady day job, now’s the time to figure out a way to earn extra income in your spare time. Freelancing, selling items on Etsy, building a side business—two hundred extra dollars every week for the next twenty years can create peace of mind for a lifetime.

within very wide bands, more money doesn’t make people happier. Learning how to think about money, though, usually does.

In the long run, doing work that’s important leads to more happiness than doing work that’s merely profitable.