Strategy Is Overrated

The uncomfortable reality

The hard truth is that many leaders think they have a strategy when all they really have is a wish list, a budget, a slogan, and/or a handful of initiatives labelled as “strategic”. It feels like leadership, looks like governance but it rarely changes behaviour. 

In my years as a strategy consultant, external and in-house, what passes for strategy is mostly

• Vision statements that inspire briefly but do shape decisions
• Lengthy documents no one reads after the planning retreats or offsites.
• Annual plans driven by last year’s numbers, with guidance of changes from Accounting and Finance department and a few cosmetic adjustments to add strategic rationale and/or initiatives guided by the Strategy department.

This is strategy theatre. Or in local Asian parlance, ‘strategy wayang’.  It creates the appearance of direction without the discipline of choice. Beneath the polished decks, teams are disengaged, priorities collide, and decisions default to politics, precedent, or gut instinct.

Why “no strategy” quietly destroys 

When strategy is weak, incoherent or implicit:- 

• Every opportunity appears compelling, so resources are spread thin across too many initiatives and projects
• Departments chase their own goals, creating internal friction and wasted effort.
• Short-term wins are celebrated while long-term positioning are ignored. Afterall, some of us believe we serve only a “term” 
• Execution becomes frenetic but unfocused, and teams are left feeling fatique and unmotivated

The organisation resembles a strong rowing team pulling hard—just not in the same direction. From a distance, it looks energetic. From above, it is stalled. Over time, this dilution of focus destroys competitive advantage, exhausts talent, and commoditises what once made the enterprise distinctive.

Revisiting what strategy is, and take action.

Ruthlessly simplify your strategy. Abandon the 50-100+ page strategic plan and revisit those presentations designed to reassure stakeholders rather than confront reality. Avoid (and eliminate) buzzword-heavy narratives around “innovation”, “digital”, “transformation” without substance and generic aspirations to “be number one,” “pursue excellence”, “delight customers”, that we often hear.

If your strategy cannot be explained readily, or recalled by your managers, it is too vague to matter. Strategy is a small set of hard-edged, lived-out choices:

• Who you exist to serve,and just as importantly, who you do not
• Which specific problems you are uniquely positioned to solve
• How you will solve them differently and defensibly
• Where you will concentrate your scarce time, talent, and capital
• What you will deliberately stop doing, even when it is profitable, popular, or familiar

Are you building tomorrow’s advantage? Does your strategy balance today’s performance with future position? Strategic clarity does not emerge from workshops; it emerges from rigorous self-examination. Leadership teams must be willing to ask, and answer, questions that are uncomfortable and hard:

1. If our organisation disappeared tomorrow, who would genuinely feel the loss, and for what specific reason?
2. Which activities generate disproportionate value, and which persist only because of history or internal politics?
3. Where do we claim differentiation that the market does not recognise or reward?
4. What investments are we making out of imitation or politics rather than based on analytics and conviction?
5. What would we stop immediately if we were forced to cut 30% of our portfolio?

These answers to these questions are sometimes unsettling. That discomfort is not a flaw, it is often the starting point of strategy.

When strategy becomes real

A real strategy is visible not in statements, but in actions and behaviour:

• Projects that do not fit are terminated even when they have powerful sponsors
• Capital and talent are concentrated on a few decisive bets, not distributed evenly to avoid conflict 
• Leaders at every level can articulate, in plain language, why the organisation exists and how it wins

The inflection point comes when strategy ceases to be an annual exercise and becomes a discipline, a framework that governs trade-offs, shapes culture, and authorises leaders to focus.