Are You Better at Strategy Than Your CEO? You Might Be.
David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach based in the Amsterdam region, working with senior leaders, directors and executive teams. This article walks through Richard Rumelt's four-part framework for real strategy and offers a short test for assessing your own company's strategy. It is written for executives who want to sharpen their strategic thinking.
By the time you finish reading this, you'll know.
Most strategies that boards and executive teams produce have one big problem.
They're not strategies.
Then what are they? Often, a list of goals, a wishlist really, dressed up in fluffy, strategic sounding language.
You've seen them. "We will become the market leader by combining operational excellence with customer focus and an innovative culture. We will invest in our people, strengthen our technology, and build sustainable partnerships."
Sounds substantial. But look closer. There's no analysis of what's actually happening. No real choice. No mention of what the company will refuse to do. And no specific obstacle to break through first.
What you're left with is a list of good intentions, written in language that sounds strategic and complex. Sometimes even packaged in a 50-slide deck.
What real strategy actually looks like
Richard Rumelt, the UCLA strategy professor and one of the world's most respected strategy experts, wrote a whole book about this called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. His point fits in one line. Most "strategies" are just wishlists, wrapped up in fluffy language. And that holds for most strategy for executives produced at board level today.
So what is a real strategy then? At its heart, a real strategy is a creative way to focus your limited resources, your time, money, attention, and energy, on overcoming the one obstacle that matters most.
Rumelt argues that to do that well, a strategy needs four parts. Miss one, and what you have isn't really a strategy.
I'll walk you through the four parts, using the example of Southwest Airlines.
A diagnosis. This is an honest and accurate analysis of what's actually going on. For Southwest, the diagnosis was that flying short distances within the US wasn't working well for most travelers. The big airlines were all built around long-haul flights, and they routed most passengers through a few large central airports, forcing you to change planes along the way. So a short flight between two nearby cities was often expensive, slow, and full of layovers. A clear picture of what was actually wrong with the market.
An obstacle. Within every diagnosis sits one core problem you have to break through before anything else works. Rumelt calls it the crux. For Southwest, the crux was a tough one. How do you make short flights cheap and fast enough to compete with cars and buses, when every existing airline's cost structure makes that essentially impossible?
A guiding policy. This is the approach you'll take to overcome that obstacle, before any concrete actions. Southwest's was simple to state. Be the cheapest, fastest airline for short US flights. Just one sentence, and yet look at everything it quietly rules out. No long-haul. No business class. No in-flight meals. No partnerships with other airlines. No making passengers connect through large central airports.
Coherent actions. Finally, a handful of moves that reinforce each other and flow from the policy. Southwest flew only one aircraft type (737s) to keep maintenance and training cheap. They used secondary airports with lower landing fees. They had no assigned seating, which made boarding faster. They cross-trained ground crews for 20-minute turnarounds. Point-to-point routes only, no connections through central hubs. Every action made the others work better, and none of them contradicted the policy.
That's a strategy. Compare it to something like "innovate faster and cut costs and improve customer focus and shrink every department by ten percent". One is a set of clear, reinforcing choices designed to overcome a main obstacle. The other is what an executive team produces when it's avoiding the work of actually choosing.
Want to try it for yourself?
If you have access to it, look at your organization's strategy statement or document.
Then ask yourself three questions. What specific problem is this strategy solving? What's the approach we've chosen? And what are we explicitly refusing to do?
If you can't answer in single sentences, you're probably holding a wishlist.
And honestly, you're in good company if that's the case. Research from MIT Sloan found that only 28% of executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could name three of their company's top priorities. Older HBR research from Kaplan and Norton suggested fewer than 5% of employees understood their company's strategy at all.
Which means the people running organizations often struggle to put into words where they're actually trying to take them.
This isn't really their fault
Strategic thinking is rarely taught explicitly. A handful of MBA programs cover it well, but most don't. Most senior leaders pick up bits of it on the job, if at all.
And the executive role already asks a lot. Operations, people, stakeholders, the board, market changes, the next earnings cycle. Strategy work tends to happen in whatever gaps remain after everything else has been handled.
So it's no surprise that most strategy documents come out looking the way they do.
Which is exactly the opportunity
This isn't a niche problem either. Big corporations do it. Governments do it too. Multi-billion-euro national plans that, on closer read, turn out to be mostly lists of intentions with budgets attached.
Which is precisely what makes real strategy such an advantage. Strong strategy for executives is rare enough that getting it right pulls you ahead of most of your peers by default.
The whole point of strategy is concentration. You have limited resources, whether that's time, money, attention, or your team's energy. A real strategy points all of them at the one obstacle that, once broken through, makes everything else easier. That's where outsized results come from.
Most organizations end up spreading their resources thinly across a dozen vague ambitions that don't reinforce each other. Small wins everywhere. Real progress nowhere.
An executive team that actually concentrates its resources on the right obstacle pulls ahead in ways that compound, year after year, while the competition keeps trying to do operational excellence and innovation and customer focus and three other things all at the same time.
The companies and leaders who get this right become very hard to catch.
Where you go from here
If you've read this far, and you've started mentally running your own company's strategy through Rumelt's four parts, that's actually a really good sign. That instinct, the slight discomfort about whether what you're calling a strategy actually is one, is exactly the right starting point.
From here it gets more interesting. The harder part is bringing this thinking into your executive team in a way that opens up the conversation, rather than putting people on the defensive. That's where most leaders find they need a thinking partner.
For senior leaders who want to sharpen their strategy for executives, my coaching for senior leaders is built for exactly that work. For organizations that want to bring this clarity to a wider management layer, management training applies the same principles across teams.
What did you find when you tested your company's strategy?
Interested or curious? Let's chat. Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.
