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

by Seth Godin

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

If scarcity is one of the elements of a game, we benefit from embracing the fact that we can’t have everything, do everything, or offer everything. 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.

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

When we choose our customers, we embrace their worldview and the system they are part of. Their budgets become our budgets. Their priorities become ours as well.

If you set out to serve very demanding clients that expect custom work, low prices, and plenty of personal service, that is how you’ll spend your days. If you raise your prices 30%, you might exchange your value-seeking customers for those that use high price as a signal of quality. The work we do and the way we transact is a story and a signal, not simply an exchange of goods.

You can choose your customers, and train and reward the ones you’d like to keep. By rewarding some behaviors over others, by keeping some promises but not making others, by having standards, you get the audience you deserve. Some things you can train customers to do: • Be respectful (or rude) • Be patient (or selfish) • Keep their satisfaction to themselves (or share it with others) • Demand personal service • Be impatient for the next revision • Be cheap (or generous) • Expect pampering (or be grateful for whatever they get) • Demand free (or seek luxury) • Be eager to switch brands to save a buck (or be loyal) • Be skeptical (or trust your judgment) The customers you pay attention to—and those you fire—change the way you spend your days (if you’re not firing customers, you’re surrendering your future to whoever walks in the door). You can identify and reward the customers you’d like to spend your days with. You have the freedom and power to do this if you choose. It’s not easy to persuade someone to want what you want. It’s much more productive to find people who already want to go where you’d like to take them.

We can’t have an impact on everyone. None of us can. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make things better for someone.

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.

Tim Wu made it crystal clear that once we have enough to survive, we go looking for convenience. People will trade almost anything once they’re offered an option that enhances laziness or seems to multiply free time. And this helps us see that what most people in most systems want is reassurance. Freedom from fear. Knowing that they’re going to be okay, and that tomorrow will be okay too. As people report feelings of alienation and loneliness, it seems as though the shortage of nurturing community is getting worse, despite the extraordinary amount of time we spend online, supposedly in connection with others. One reason is that people also crave celebrity. The myth of the influencer, the loneliness of the overlooked, the desire for connection and meaning… they all end up pushing people to share their ideas and their lives. Most of these desires, particularly status, are insatiable. When the system rewards and encourages our desires, we often come back for even more. If you want to make a large impact, harnessing an insatiable desire is the method. Status, safety, affiliation, and curiosity are universal and always interacting, as people around the world seek success and hope for solace.

The flu virus doesn’t want us to die, but it needs to make us sick so we’ll sneeze on other people and spread it. Viruses that can’t accomplish that disappear. The same is true for the social systems that appear to rule our lives.

127. The Five Steps to Widespread Change It begins with a nucleus. This core group shares a desire. Perhaps they’re frustrated, left out, seeking something better or something new. They are not typical. Offer that group connection, status, forward motion, opportunity, and insight. This feeling is often different from what the masses will eventually adopt. Second, maximize the chances for a small win. Small wins are evidence of progress. They create group cohesion, commitment, and most of all give the nucleus something to point to. Third, give the nucleus a way to talk about the work. What they say to the others is almost certainly not what you said to them. This requires an empathic leap, offering the next circle of people a story that resonates with their desires, not yours. Fourth, create the likelihood of another win. This stepwise process of story » action » cohesion can be repeated again and again. Momentum is often the only thing on offer. “This is happening—are you coming?” is more powerful than, “Let me explain all the facts about what is possible.” Finally, establish new status roles, affiliation opportunities, and data exchange to codify a system going forward. The infrastructure doesn’t come first. In fact, it gets built much later, after people care enough about being part of the new system.

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 for decades, and yet people keep looking for a shortcut. A shortcut to change the entire system. A shortcut to promote an idea to every human and explain why the new way is better. A shortcut to get picked. Your idea might be rejected because it’s not better. But it’s probably going to be rejected because it’s new.

Time and systems hide in plain sight. The systems of today are often invisible, and tomorrow is an unexplored and undiscovered land. A strategy requires us to travel through time—to get from today to tomorrow and the tomorrows after that.

These are the early adopters and believers—and some of them are sneezers. They tell everyone they can about your new idea.

Ideas that spread, win. And traction is underrated.

Geoff Moore took Rogers’ idea and expanded it by focusing on the way time unfolds as an idea spreads through the culture.

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.

Scaffolding is multiplied when we add cultural cohesion, interoperability, and the network effect. When we’re surrounded by people who already know, our journey gets easier, and the tension involved in moving forward outweighs our fear.

When you start out, you’ll need scaffolding. But the powerful application of this idea is realizing that you can offer it to others. If the change you make depends on others joining in, making that compelling and easy to do is your first and only job. 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.

The masses are a choice, one you can commit to or plan on avoiding.

According to Deming and Crosby and other quality pioneers, quality simply means “meets specifications.”

When we pursue quality, we then have two jobs: • Agree on the spec for the customer we seek to serve. • Make sure the product or service meets the spec.

A short-term game is a discrete interaction with an outcome. Some examples: • Talking your way out of a traffic ticket • Finishing a freelance project and pleasing the client • Writing a post that wins a lot of attention online • Winning an argument with your partner A long-term game is the sum of a series of short-term games. Examples include: • The outcome of a night of playing poker • A ten-year career as a brand manager • Building a platform for your work online

Luca Dellanna reminds us that winning all the short-term games is not the best strategy for long-term success. He proposes a few ways to consider a series of games. Here are three: • Use short-term games to build long-term soft assets like trust or habits. • Play iterated games, embracing the fact that you’ll probably be back tomorrow. • Take intentional risks, but don’t expose yourself to the chance of losing your core assets.

There are infinite and finite games. Finite games are games we play to win. They have players, beginnings, and endings. Infinite games are games we play to play.

In the realm of finite games, some are based on abundance, others on scarcity. An election is a scarcity game. There are winners and losers, and the only way for you to get a vote is to take it from someone else. There are entire industries that are based on scarcity. Farming is about increasing yield on a finite piece of land. Network TV is about gaining market share at the expense of other broadcasters. But there are also finite games that involve abundance. Book publishers understand that one book rarely competes with another—the opportunity is to sell more books overall. Bookstores are filled with competitive titles, but that’s where books sell best—next to other books. Every strategy includes a game. We need to choose and understand the game we’re playing.

As we’ve seen, some games are actually dyads involving you and one other person. No outside forces are involved, at least not in a timeframe that matters to you. It could be the interaction at the rental car counter, your relationship with a co-worker, or even someone you pass on the highway. In our civilized world, the vast majority of these interactions are positive and kind. But sometimes they’re oppositional. The other person has decided that they can’t win unless you lose (or perhaps vice versa). Someone is trying to dominate, creating the conditions for a non-generative showdown. There is no room for compromise or a win-win solution, because the only successful outcome for the other person is that you lose. And they may be willing to bend the rules or dramatically overinvest in order to come out ahead. The challenge is that win or lose, you probably won’t thrive in the long run. What should you do instead? Pause. Use time as an ally. Find ways to influence the larger system. Or simply walk away and play a better game with a better opponent.

Teaching the opponent a lesson in this moment may cost you more than it’s worth. We can save oppositional games for the pickleball court. They don’t work well in real life.

Competing for market share, dominance or the last pastry pushes us to think urgently about the game that’s in front of us. There are several approaches to consider: Punching down feels ungallant, but it’s actually the most common approach. Using our strengths, we eliminate weaker competition by highlighting the benefits of our dominant offering. IBM kept the computer market to itself for decades. Taylor Swift keeps selling records. The market leader offers a combination of safety, skill, reliability and leverage that makes it easy for them to serve existing systems. Punching up can be the best option for the insurgent newcomer. Going where the dominant player can’t or won’t go turns your smaller size and experience into an asset. Staying in your lane is often the right strategy for a market leader facing an insurgent. In Walmart’s case, management understood that shifting their financial structure, business model and focus to shut out Amazon would require that they walk away from decades of growth in markets where they were already dominant. Cooperation is the most often overlooked option. Alliances, networks and rewiring information flow create new opportunities because value is added, not simply captured. There are actually very few zero-sum games, we simply need to use our imagination. What doesn’t work? Insisting. Trying harder. Being just like the leader, but not them.

In 1973, Leigh Van Valen demonstrated that species go extinct as a result of changes in their environment, not because they are ancient or out of steam. Since other species are evolving at the same time, what worked yesterday to support an organism might not work today. There’s a constant race for a sinecure, and even when one is found, it doesn’t last. The Red Queen Theory helps us understand why our world seems so chaotic. AOL won the internet, until Yahoo did, until Google did, until Facebook did, until TikTok did. There isn’t an end, but simply the beginning of a new game, played anew. Our strategy will work until it doesn’t. Because our strategy has an impact on the system, the system changes. Not simply as the result of our work, but in response to other strategies as well.

Your current success might have been hard-earned. But the future doesn’t care about this as much as you do.

Avoid projects where the system is organized to take all the value you create.

The smallest organizations have an advantage when they create projects. With nothing to lose and few people to please, it’s possible to create moments of magic. Small projects from small teams can leap forward with the confidence of knowing that they don’t have far to fall. When a project works, it’s tempting and generous to scale it. Offer it to more people. Turn one successful restaurant into a chain, or a small medical practice into a much larger one. And almost inevitably, it falters. The only way to effectively scale magic is to create a strategy where the scale is the magic. Heinz ketchup is better because it’s the regular kind, the safe kind, the normal kind. That’s the magic they offer. Disney is magic because it offers predictable, industrialized, mass fun. They turned that from an oxymoron to a motto. It’s the place to go if you want to go to where everyone else is going. Projects where the scale is the magic have a network effect. The more people who use them, the better they get.

When new technology changes the rules, old systems rarely thrive.

Each person in a system will always act in their self-interest.

Culture is “people like us do things like this.” The links add up to a persistent and relentless reminder of culture. If you want to predict how a system will respond to an input, begin by describing what’s in the self-interest of the node you’re interacting with.

The empathy of a useful strategy sees and respects the agency of everyone else.

We create value when we establish the conditions for status and affiliation to be delivered to those that seek it.

Bringing Strategy to Marketing There are three steps: • Tell a story, a true story, one that holds up. And tell it only to your smallest viable audience, the tiny group that is actually listening to you, that cares and that is among the early adopters. Create tension and urgency. • Give this group a reason to share the story with others. Something that will increase their status, their affiliation with others, or increase the utility of supporting your product, service or cause. Give them the scaffolding to do this. • Help them, through use or narrative, alter the story to make it theirs.

Years ago, I produced several albums for a fledgling record label I had started. One duo I produced were gifted musicians living together in a van, traveling from town to town and playing in small coffee shops, then moving on. These places were the most accessible rung on the performance ladder, one step above open mic night. I helped them understand that the van wasn’t doing them any favors. If they stayed in one place for a while, they could build an audience and gain a reputation. After a short run at one place, they’d have enough credibility to headline a bigger club, building an audience that would allow them to work through the system. The bookers at bigger clubs don’t have better ears. They’re simply nodes in a system, paying attention to where someone came from and whether or not they’ll bring an audience along. Starting over at zero because it’s the easiest node is a trap, and yet talented freelancers do this every single day. A gig on Fiverr or UpWork might be easy to get, but if it doesn’t plug you into a system that amplifies your work, it gets in the way of the change you seek to make.

The system seeks to reduce tension by insisting we fit in and offer a commodity. That’s a race to the bottom. The successful insurgent creates tension as a response—the tension of FOMO and of networks that must be joined.

In 1952, Ray Bradbury wrote a short story called “A Sound of Thunder.” In it, a time-traveling tourist to the distant past steps on a butterfly, and the entire future of the world is changed as a result. While chaos theory predicts that tiny changes can lead to momentous outcomes, persistent systems persist precisely because they resist tiny changes. So go ahead and kill the butterfly—the problems and challenges of tomorrow’s world will remain unchanged.

In The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner tells a story of how Peter and Rosemary Grant measure (to the millimeter) the length of the beaks on finches born on one island in the Galapagos. During wet periods, conditions are such that long-beaked finches are more successful at finding food, and therefore they are more likely to reproduce, so the percentage of finches with long beaks increases. But if the climate changes and there’s a long dry spell, these finches struggle, while the short-beaked finches are more easily able to find the food they need. So the population shifts again. That’s why there are still finches—the evolutionary response to the climate’s changes keeps them from going extinct. On the other hand, feedback loops can also cycle in the other direction, spiraling out of control. A simple example is the release of rabbits in Australia a century ago. With no predators and plenty of food, they multiplied (like rabbits) until a crisis occurred.

Either we’re working the system or the system is working us.

When we combine systems, game theory, and feedback loops, we can begin to see how our actions influence behaviors over time. Here are some of the precepts of strategic impact. • Think ahead and reason back: When we know who it’s for, what it’s for, and how we hope to get there, we can start at the end and work backward for where to begin. • The empathy of a mutual win: We can avoid oppositional entanglements when we choose to work with people and systems that want to win something we don’t care so much about, especially when they offer us something we do care about. • Trust and expectation: Follow through on commitments and threats to maintain credibility and influence others’ behavior. Tension is real if we are consistent. • Make the consequences intended: Consider the potential unintended consequences of your strategies, as they may lead to suboptimal outcomes. • Leverage information asymmetry: Use your unique knowledge or information to your advantage, but be aware that others may be doing the same. • Create and shape the rules of the game: If you choose to play in an arena where you have influence over the rules, it’s more likely you will achieve your goals. Don’t count on winning games that are stacked against you. • Manage expectations: Experiences are largely relative. If it’s better than expected, it’s better. • Foster cooperation through repetition: Encourage cooperation by engaging in repeated interactions and building a reputation for reciprocity. • All...

Donella Meadows outlined several systems traps that help us see how they persist and what our options are if we want to make change happen. From a user’s point of view, they seem like defects, but they’re actually built into the system from the start. • Policy resistance is the self-maintaining re-centering that feedback loops enable systems to achieve. We might try to fix the economy or end drug use or balance a budget, but the forces at work resist. Individuals in the system might not intentionally seek to sabotage a policy change, but the balanced system subverts it nonetheless. The status quo is the status quo because it’s good at sticking around. • The tragedy of the commons is the depletion of a shared resource because rational individuals believe they have no incentive to hold back. When all the farmers share a plot of land, each might as well let their sheep get fat, or someone else will. Things like clean air are hard to achieve because individuals acting in their self-interest often see no reason to invest to stop their own pollution. • Drift to low performance is the disappointing path of comparing our low performance to others’ even worse performance, and creating a feedback loop of lowering the bar. Once a neighborhood starts to be unkempt, it’s likely that someone might care less and make it a bit worse, which amplifies the downward spiral. • The race to the bottom is not the same as drift. This is the intentional effort of lower prices, worse service, mo...

Robert Moses called himself a master builder. He created the conditions for the construction of an astonishing array of roads, parks, bridges, power plants, and more. The entire fabric of New York City was rebuilt during his 50-year reign. He was also a master of strategy. He understood systems and how to take advantage of system traps and status to accomplish his goals. But most of all, he is now known as the master manipulator. He used his strategic skills to create outcomes that those involved came to regret. By focusing on the short run with urgency, he failed to take responsibility for the long-term impact of his actions. He ended up using his power in a way that didn’t benefit the people it was supposed to benefit. Here are some of the Moses manipulations that take advantage of human nature and system traps. I am listing them here not as a manual on how to manipulate or help you maximize power, but so that we can be aware of them and use them with full knowledge that the ends don’t always justify the means. • Stake driving: Moses would begin actual construction work on a project as quickly as possible, often starting with driving actual stakes into the ground before he had permits or funding. This made the projects seem inevitable and more difficult to oppose or alter. Systems are often optimized to slow things down, not to undo things that are already happening. • Whipsawing: He would create crises where groups with competing interests would focus on earning statu...

If you change what gets measured, you’ll change what gets done. The nodes in the system work to achieve their goals, and that effort, coordinated without a coordinator, creates the forward motion and power of the system. How do people know what to do? They know what they want. They want status, affiliation, comfort, freedom from fear, and convenience. But each of us is a bit unsure how to get those things. And so we seek out proxies. Getting into a famous college isn’t the cause of satisfaction. It’s a goal, an achievable proxy, a way to tell ourselves a story. The same is true with making money, avoiding a dirty look, or clearing our inbox. The best tactic I know for someone seeking to influence a system is simple: Elevate the useful proxies and diminish the presence of the false ones.

It’s easiest to see a system when it stops functioning as it did.