If you have a strategy then there must be some things that are not part of it. Unless of course everything is part of it, in which case it’s not much of a strategy, is it?
Sid Meier famously defined a game as “a series of interesting choices”. In a world of infinite possibilities and finite resources, any course of action is implicitly a choice. Your business strategy’s primary role is to suggest the way in which you intend to approach the “interesting choices” that will carve your action path.
And while we tend to think of action paths in terms of “what we will do”, an equivalent and equally salient way to understand it would be in terms of “things we won’t do”.
You know you have a strategy when you have the ability to say No. If, in the face of hypothetical decisions, your strategy does not provide you with clear reasons to say “we won’t do this”, then what is it good for?
