A strategy has to fit on one page, and it has to survive Monday morning: how your company decides, aligns and learns.
The first part is the easier one. The second is where margin is lost.
A company can have a fifty-page strategy and none of it in how it actually runs. What counts isn't the slide deck. It's what your salesperson decides when a customer pushes back on price. What a manager does when two departments' interests collide. And whether anyone can say no to a good deal because it doesn't fit the direction the company chose.
If you can't explain it in five sentences to someone in your warehouse, you don't have a strategy. You have a document.
One direction. Different roles.
Living strategy doesn't mean everyone does the same thing. The owner, the leadership team, middle management and the frontline have different roles and make different decisions. But they all have to start from the same choice.
The owner shouldn't be making the salesperson's decisions. The salesperson shouldn't reinvent how the company wins with every customer. Middle managers shouldn't wait for instructions in every situation, and the leadership team shouldn't let each department write its own version of the strategy.
While it's being built: carries the risk of the choice and decides what the company is willing to give up. When the table still disagrees after every argument has been heard, the owner has the final say, out loud, in front of everyone. Not because they know the most, but because they're the only one at the table with their own assets on the line.
Afterwards: makes sure the choice survives its first test under pressure, and creates the conditions for the truth to reach them, even when it's uncomfortable.
While it's being built: sees the market, the competition and the numbers in more detail than the owner, because they work with them every day. They show where the company really makes money and where it loses it, what competitors do differently, and what the company can actually deliver. Without that, the owner would be deciding on a picture two years out of date.
Afterwards: aligns resources, priorities, processes, metrics, incentives and decision rights, so that every part of the company acts on the same direction instead of interpreting it its own way.
While it's being built: knows what in the proposed choice won't work in practice, and why. They know the teams' real capacity, where work gets stuck, and what's been tried before and failed. They're at the table from the start, not just when the finished strategy is announced.
Afterwards: turns direction into people's everyday decisions. They know what the choice means for their team, what to stop doing, where they can decide on their own and what they should no longer escalate. They're not the strategy's messenger; they're the link: direction down, reality up.
While it's being built: hears the customer directly and unfiltered, so they know why a customer left, what they compared and what was missing. The salesperson, the service technician, the driver, the shift supervisor. You can't get this from a report, and the leadership team has no other way to know it. Without their voice, the choice rests on assumptions about the market.
Afterwards: acts in specific situations no document could have anticipated. That's where you find out whether the strategy exists, and they're the people the customer actually sees.
The choice is made around the same table. Then direction flows down and the customer's reality flows up. Break either flow, and the strategy stops living.
An unhealthy company
- The owner says: we win on expertise
- Sales is targeted on revenue, production on efficiency, service on call-outs
- Every department has its own plan, and nobody has put them together
- Under pressure, the salesperson discounts to hit their number
- All the customer saw was a price
Living strategy
- They made the choice together, each bringing their piece of reality
- The leadership team reallocates resources and aligns department targets around it
- Middle management leads people by it
- The salesperson defends value with it
- The customer actually experiences the expertise
On the left, nobody is lying and everyone does their job well. The company is heading in four directions.
The choice nobody can make for you
A budget isn't a strategy. Annual targets aren't a strategy. Neither is a project list, a SWOT analysis or a vision on the wall. All of them have their place, and you can produce every one of them without making a single real choice. Not everything in a company is strategy. But everything that's meant to carry it has to fit with it.
A living strategy needs seven answers, and a company has one when it can give all seven without anyone at the table wondering what we mean:
- where we play, and where we deliberately don't
- how we win there, and what makes us unique
- what capabilities we have to do it
- which management systems hold it together
- what culture will carry it
- what we stop doing as a result
- and what we want to achieve.
The third answer is the one most often skipped, because it's the only one you can test against the budget, and a choice you have neither the people nor the money for won't happen, however well it's written.
Full note: The execution myth →
If a company has ten strategic priorities that don't connect, it doesn't have ten priorities. It has ten projects.
It starts with an honest picture of today. The owner says we win on expertise. Management runs the company as if it wins on service. The salesperson in front of the customer wins with a discount. Nobody is lying; each of them is living a different version of the same company.
That's why I put the Four views of the company side by side, plus the customer's view:
- what the company claims about itself
- how the leadership team thinks it wins
- what middle management does with that
- what your people do with customers every day
- and what the customer ends up experiencing.
Four come from inside the company, the customer's view from outside, and the real problem usually sits in the gaps between them. The pain shows up in one place, but the cause often lies somewhere else.
Falling margin looks like a sales problem; in fact it's a weak position in the value chain. Weak sales look like a sales-team problem; in fact the company has no clear reason why the customer should buy from it. Slow decisions look like a management problem; in fact nobody knows where their decision rights end.
First name the real obstacle. Only then does it make sense to look for a solution.
A complex problem rarely has one obvious answer. That's why I don't want the leadership team falling in love with the first solution too early.
Could we move into another segment? Change what customers pay us for? Move closer to the end customer in the value chain? Stop selling a line item and start selling an outcome? Deliberately stop serving some of our customers?
And for every option we ask: what would have to be true for this to work? Then we test those assumptions. Not everything can be calculated up front, because strategy is a decision under uncertainty, and it needs judgement, not just a spreadsheet.
This is usually the hardest part of working with an owner. The company wants a new direction and wants to keep everything old. The new segment and every current customer. A new priority without dropping an old one. New accountability for managers, plus the owner's final say on every important decision.
That doesn't produce a strategy. It produces another layer of work.
Every serious yes needs its no. If we can't say what we'll stop doing, where we'll stop spending money, or which opportunity we'll turn down, we haven't made a strategic choice yet.
Where the money and people go, that's your real strategy
A presentation can say anything. The budget, the leadership team's calendar and the list of people trusted with the most important work tell you far more about a company's strategy.
- If the company announces a new priority and the money stays in the old activities, the old priority has won.
- If a new way of working is supposed to emerge and your best people are still tied up in the old one, nothing new emerges.
- If a manager is supposed to decide independently and the owner takes the decision back at the first problem, the old system has won again.
- If the owner says on Monday that the company wins on value and approves a discount on Tuesday, Tuesday revealed the real strategy.
So I don't just ask what we'll start doing. I also ask: what will we stop, where will the people come from, where will the money come from, who gets the decision rights, which target or bonus pushes people to do the opposite, and what will no longer end up on the owner's desk.
When results don't come, it's easy to say: our strategy is good, people just can't execute it. It's a comfortable explanation, because it shifts the problem from the leadership team to managers and the people below them.
But often the strategy failed before anyone had to execute it. There was no clear choice. Resources weren't reallocated. Departments got conflicting targets. Middle management was never given decision rights.
Then the problem isn't that people execute the strategy badly. It's that the system never gave them one strategy they could execute at all.
Culture isn't values on the wall
Company culture isn't an HR topic. It's the company's operating system: how we talk to each other, how we work together, how we resolve disagreements, and how what someone hears from a customer makes it all the way to a decision.
That's why HR can't own it. The owner and the leadership team own it, because every day their behaviour either builds it or tears it down.
It's not a team-building weekend in the mountains. It's not free coffee, fruit in the kitchen or values printed on the wall by reception. Culture is what happens in your company under pressure.
Safety to speak up
The technical term is psychological safety. In plain words: the belief that nobody will punish me for telling the truth, asking a question, admitting a mistake or proposing something new.
It's not about being nice to each other. It's about money. When someone sees a problem and stays quiet, the company fixes it later, at a higher cost. When they speak up, it gets fixed cheaply.
Google spent two years studying 180 of its teams and 250 attributes. Psychological safety came out as the number one factor, ahead of dependability, structure and clarity, and meaning. (Project Aristotle)
Safety alone isn't enough
Without accountability for results, safety gives you a pleasant company that goes nowhere. The real goal is both at once.
People feel good and nothing is expected of them.
People speak up and own the results.
Nothing happens, and nobody minds.
Performance, but no learning. You hear about problems late.
You don't get out of the bottom-right box by lowering accountability, or out of the top-left by lowering safety. You have to raise both at once.
Not all failures are equal
A company that punishes every failure the same way buys silence and loses learning. There are three kinds, and each calls for a different response:
- Preventable. A known process, and someone didn't follow it. You fix the process, or you correct the person.
- Complex. Several things went wrong at once, and no single person caused it. You look for the cause, not someone to blame.
- Intelligent. We tried something new, with a clear hypothesis and a small risk. You don't meet this with silence but with a question: what did we learn?
Without this distinction, people stop trying anything new. The risk isn't worth it to them.
The loop that keeps strategy alive
What the salesperson, the service technician or the driver hears has to get back to whoever makes the next decision. Up to the leadership team, across departments, and back down as change.
You can measure it with one number: how long it takes for a signal from the market to reach the leadership team. If it's hours, the company is alive. If it's days, the strategy is a document.
A salesperson knows a deal makes no sense. Can they say so, or do they have to hit the target at any cost?
Production knows sales has promised something production can't deliver. Does it speak up, or quietly absorb the problem?
A manager sees that the owner's pet project isn't working. Do they tell the owner?
Someone makes a mistake. Does the company ask why it happened, or look for someone to blame?
Two departments have conflicting interests. Do they look for the best result for the company, or protect their own numbers?
Strategy sets the direction. Culture decides how people behave when there's pressure to drift from it.
Test: Silence in the room → · Note: Synthesis, not compromise →
Without the truth, you don't have a strategy. You have an idea of one.
They know which customer is likely to leave. Which project isn't working. Which assumption in the plan is too optimistic. Where you're losing deals. Which decision people have been working around for six months.
The question is whether they'll say it. An owner can have an open door, and still nobody walks through it with bad news. It's not about the door. It's about what happens in your company to the person who tells an uncomfortable truth.
If it's safer to stay quiet than to name a problem, information gets cleaned up on its way to the top. Every layer softens it a little. And in the end the owner is deciding on a reality nobody on the frontline would recognise.
It's a precondition for good strategic decisions. It doesn't mean comfort, low standards or everyone having to agree.
It means someone can say: I disagree · this isn't working · we made a mistake · the customer doesn't trust us · this plan rests on an assumption that isn't true. And not pay for it with their career.
When the truth doesn't reach the decision, the decision can't be better than the information it rests on.
A strategy discussion without disagreement worries me more than it reassures me. If a decision is genuinely strategic, it involves uncertainty, risk and giving something up. It's natural for people to see it differently.
What matters is that those differences are put on the table before the decision, not in the corridor after the meeting.
Good alignment doesn't mean we all think the same. It means every serious objection has been heard, we've tested the assumptions, we've decided, and now we know which way we're going.
Strategy doesn't end with a leadership decision
Customers never see the strategy deck. They see the salesperson, the offer, the price, the delivery, the service, how fast you respond, and what working with you actually delivered.
If the company claims to win on expertise and the salesperson gives a discount at the first push, the customer experienced a different strategy.
If the company claims to know its customer and three departments ask them for the same information, the customer experienced a different strategy.
If sales promises value the company doesn't deliver, the customer experienced a different strategy.
Your salesperson is fighting for price at the very end of a deal the strategy should have won long before.
What customers actually do, need, reject and are willing to pay for has to get back to the people making the next strategic decision.
Otherwise the company gradually starts making decisions about a market that no longer exists.
Living strategy doesn't mean changing direction every month
A company needs to know what it wants to protect and what it's ready to change. Not everything old is bad, and not everything new is strategic. Too much stability leads to stagnation, too much change to chaos.
So I don't want a new strategy every three months. I want a firm direction and a regular reality check: what we assumed, what held up, what didn't, what we learned from customers, where the competition has moved, which choice to hold, and which one reality has already disproved.
Good strategy doesn't try to predict what's coming. It asks what would have to be true for our choice to work, then tests that cheaply in the field while course correction is still cheap.
Note: Compass and GPS → · Note: Exploit and explore at the same time →
The result shouldn't be a document only the owner and I understand
Where we play, where we don't, and how we win.
Who decides what, and up to what limit.
So good decisions don't have to wait for the owner.
People and money where they build the company's future.
A way for them to reach the leadership team before they start costing money.
So the customer experiences what the company chose.
Assumptions regularly tested against the market.
The goal isn't a company that needs a strategy advisor forever. It's a company that makes more and more of the right decisions on its own.
Four levels at one table
- The owner carries the risk of the choice and has the final say.
- The leadership team shows where the company really makes money and where it loses it.
- Middle managers know what won't work in practice, and why.
- The frontline hears the customer unfiltered.
All four are at the table while the strategy is being built, not just when it's announced. Then direction flows down and the customer's reality flows up, and if either flow breaks, the strategy stops living.
Strategy is a living process with people, not a document. What each of the four levels brings to it, and what has to stay with the company when I leave, is further up this page.
Why I say engine, not machine
A brain without muscles is a strategy in a drawer, muscles without a brain are hard work with no direction, and a heart without either is a great team with nowhere to go.
So I don't fix one part of the company: I build a system in which all of them pull together. And it isn't built on new people or new money. It's how you get full performance, not half, out of the people and resources you already have.
Machine versus engine
The parts do what you tell them. When one fails, it gets replaced. That kind of company stops the moment you stop giving orders. And even if it worked, you wouldn't want to work there.
People pull in one direction because they know where they're going and why. Not because they were told to. That kind of company moves on its own.
Your people are the fuel
With everything that comes with them: what they know from the field, and what they're afraid of and won't say out loud until someone asks.
Listen to what they bring back from the field.
Help them grow.
Let them make their own decisions, and coach them to own both the decisions and the results.
Rules: what they can decide without you, where the limit is, and what happens when they get it wrong.
Confidence that an idea isn't a risk for the person who voices it.
Psychological safety to speak up is a precondition. Without it, the engine seizes.
That's what I call alignment, and it's different from both obedience and freedom:
The obedient company
- Does what you said.
- Stops the moment you stop telling it what to do.
The free-for-all company
- It moves,
- but everyone in a different direction.
People need the freedom to decide, and the company needs certainty that they won't each decide differently. A compromise between the two gives you half the freedom and half the certainty, and neither works.
Both work at once on one condition: it's written down in advance
- who can decide up to what limit
- what happens when something goes wrong
- and which choice holds it all together.
You can't buy alignment by hiring good people, or train it in through meetings. It happens when the owner, the leadership team, middle management and the frontline each decide different things based on the same choice.
Resources and direction often don't match. People, money, technology and know-how all pull in different directions, and the capacity of the owner and their people doesn't match where the company is heading or what it can realistically take on.
You have ten priorities and a team for five, so everything runs at half speed while you pay full salaries. And if it isn't clear up front what funds day-to-day operations and what funds development, development always loses.
And one more thing the engine won't move without: cash in the bank. Every choice has a cost and a timeline, and for the first months you're the one paying for a new segment. So from day one, direction comes with a second question: how do we fund it, and what happens if it takes twice as long?
Note: Exploit and explore at the same time → · Back to The company engine →
Five questions, no slide deck
These five questions aren't a list of what a strategy is made of. In ten minutes they'll tell you whether you have one:
- Where will we deliberately not play?
- How do we want to win, without the answer being “we'll be better”?
- What have we stopped doing over the last year because of this choice?
- Which important decisions can people already make without the owner?
- And which parts of our strategy does the customer actually experience today?
If the answers are vague, the problem may not be that people execute the strategy badly. Maybe the company hasn't finished it yet.
Want to know whether your strategy is alive, or just written down?