Strategy Is Choosing What Not to Do

I prepared this piece for the site; it is not a course assignment. In the introduction I wrote out, one by one, where the texts in this section come from.

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All strategy meetings go the same way.

Someone writes something on the board. A second person says, “Why don't we add this too?” A third has a very good idea. Forty minutes later there are eleven items on the board, everyone is pleased, nobody has objected, and no one who leaves the room knows which job is to be done first.

The thing on that board is not called strategy. It is a wish list.

The person who put the difference most clearly was Michael Porter: strategy is choosing what you will not do. Choosing to do something is free; if you cannot say what you have given up, you have not made a choice.

There is such a thing as a limited resource

The concept of strategy comes from war, and the reality there is merciless: the number of soldiers is fixed.

If you had unlimited resources, you would not need strategy. You would mass forces on every front, prepare for every possibility, exploit every opportunity. Strategy begins exactly where this is not possible. That is, everywhere.

Clausewitz's idea of the centre of gravity comes out of this. Where is the point at which the enemy's strength is concentrated? Where will yours be massed? You have to ask this question because you cannot mass everywhere, and an army that tries to mass everywhere is strong nowhere.

Richard Rumelt translated this distinction into modern language and finished it in a sentence: bad strategy is a list of goals, while good strategy is a diagnosis, a direction and a set of actions that support one another. If everything is on the list, there is no strategy there. There is only optimism.

We read Sun Tzu wrongly

On the shelves, The Art of War sits as a book of cunning. Yet most of the text is accounting.

The cost of the campaign. The length of the supply line. How a prolonged war eats an army up. How much an army of a thousand chariots consumes in a day. The book does not romanticize war; it works out the bill.

That is why its most quoted sentence is misunderstood. “To win without fighting is the best victory” is not pretending to wisdom. It is arithmetic. Every conflict has a price, and even a conflict you win can weaken you.

In everyday life the counterpart is this: arguments not worth entering. Jobs that should not be accepted. Fronts that should not be opened. Every quarrel in which you were right but got tired while being right.

No argument you win comes free. Its price is the work you could not do that day.

Carrying it into personal life

Carrying a concept written for companies into an individual life is often a stretch. But there is a portable core here, and that core is the idea of a limited resource.

In personal life the resource is usually not money. It is attention, energy and time.

When these three are limited, the question changes. “What will I do” is the easy question; its answer is exciting, the list grows, and going to bed at night one feels good about oneself. “What will I not do” hurts. Because removing an item from the list feels like giving up the possibility of a life in which you could have done that item.

Yet every item not removed from the list steals from the remaining items. They are all spent from the same wallet.

Why constraint is a gift

This was the main idea that my readings in strategy changed in me: a constraint is not an obstacle, it is information.

A person who is given unlimited options cannot choose. A person who is given a narrow frame starts working. Like the metre and rhyme in divan poetry (the classical Ottoman poetic tradition), which both bound the poet and forced production. The mould was not the enemy of the work; it was the scaffolding of the work.

The practical counterpart is to impose constraints on yourself deliberately. This month, a single new thing. This week, a single big task. Today, three items, no more.

If you do not impose the constraint, life does it anyway. The only difference is whom the choice belongs to.

Three signs of bad strategy

You can tell whether what you hold is a strategy with three questions.

Is there a diagnosis? If a solution is described without saying what the problem is, what is there is not strategy but wishing. “We will grow” is not a diagnosis.

Is what is given up named? If there is no answer to the question “what will we not do,” only wishes remain. When you ask this question in a meeting and the room falls silent, that is the most reliable sign that there is no strategy.

Do the items support one another? In a good strategy the actions reinforce one another; each lightens the load of the other. In a bad strategy the items compete with one another, draw on the same resource, and in the end none of them is completed.

And an objection

This language has a limit; I would not be honest if I ended without writing it.

Not everyone is in a position to build the strategy of their own life. For someone who is struggling to make a living, who carries a caregiving load, who is ill, who is in debt, the question “what will you not do” is a luxury question. Their options come already chosen.

When the language of strategy forgets this, it becomes cruel. The sentence “if you had prioritized correctly” is not an explanation when said to someone who has nothing to prioritize. It is an accusation. And this accusation goes about dressed up as responsibility.

That is why the claim of this article is only this: if you do have the possibility of choice, the way to use it passes not through adding more things but through taking them away.

The person who looks at the eleven items on the board and asks “which of these can we cross out” is the only strategist in the room. And is usually the least liked person.