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

by Seth Godin

Projects are not simply tasks. All projects: • Interact with other people • Have a beginning and an end • Seek to deliver a desired result • Have constraints • Involve unknowns When we bring intent to our project, we’re more likely to avoid drama. And reducing risk is about investing in avoiding problems before they occur. It’s possible to accidentally wander through a project and still have it succeed, but our work is more likely to pay off if we bring intention to the project. We can seek out and dance with the challenges and tension that a project creates, and we can look at each challenge clearly. 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 Sasha Dichter says, “Tell everyone about your strategy.” Tactics shift, but strategies are for the long-haul. We can identify the people we’ll need to work with, the assets we’ll need to acquire, and the risks, real and imagined, that the project faces. Why is this uncomfortable? We’ve created a cultural bias against talking about building the future. And we’ve made it worse by avoiding having conversations about the projects that matter to us.