Strategy is a discipline, not a document
— By Sheldon Morris
Most organizations do not suffer from a shortage of strategy. They suffer from a shortage of the discipline that strategy demands. The document is written, circulated, and admired — and then the organization returns to doing what it was already doing, now with a clearer sense of what it ought to be doing instead.
A strategy is a set of choices about where to concentrate a finite supply of attention, capital, and talent. Its power lies entirely in what it declines to pursue. A strategy that permits everything is not a strategy; it is an inventory of hopes.
“A strategy that permits everything is not a strategy; it is an inventory of hopes.”
The test is what you stop doing
The honest measure of a strategy is not the initiatives it launches but the ones it ends. Every organization can add. The discipline lies in subtraction — in retiring the comfortable habit, the legacy line of business, the project that survives because no one has been asked to defend it.
This is where leadership earns its keep. To hold an organization to its stated priorities, quarter after quarter, against the constant pull toward the familiar, is unglamorous work. It is also the work that separates a strategy that changes the enterprise from one that decorates a shelf.
Clarity is a kindness
A well-held strategy is a gift to the people carrying it out. It tells them what matters, and — just as usefully — what does not. It spares them the exhausting ambiguity of trying to do everything at once. Clarity, imposed with discipline and communicated with candor, is among the most generous things a leader can offer.
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