Uh oh, what’s this strategy blog anyway?

I used to think my personal and professional was separate. That they should be separate. “Work life” balance assumes work and life are opposing forces.

The older I get the more I find the two spheres organically informing each other, and that essentially, what I’m after, is a personal system that helps me make decisions (of varying stakes) more clearly and quickly.

Strategy, in other words, increasingly informs all parts of my life.

Not in any kind of gross, longevity-expert-life-hack kind of way. It’s an organic process.

A working definition of strategy

It’s funny, for something as ubiquitous as strategy, it’s notoriously tricky to pin down.

Every strategist probably defines it differently (which is in itself a problem).

Most definitions usually involve the notion that strategy is some sort of “plan.”

That’s not wrong, per se. A plan is just a formulation of action(s), usually in some sequence, and many strategies do in fact call for a sequence of actions toward some end. But as anyone who’s ever worked in the business world knows, there are plenty of plans that are in no way strategic.

My personal definition: strategy is a calculated or systematic response to a problem.

There are plenty of marketing plans, for example, that aren’t really calculated or systematic at all. They’re a list of conventional tactics that may or may not achieve a positive outcome, and could be adopted by just about any company in any circumstance.

Strategy’s a different animal. Strategy is a response to a problem, or set of problems. That in itself is a point of departure from a lot of “plans,” which are usually pretty clear about their aims or desired result (to sell product, be perceived as the biggest company, etc). What’s usually missing is the big problem getting in the way.

Richard Rumelt wrote the best book on the market about this in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy but I’ll try to paraphrase a defining example:

Strategy is David vs. Goliath. David needed a strategy because, yeah, he wanted to defeat Goliath and stay alive, but more critically, because he was way smaller than Goliath. Goliath had a huge size advantage (David’s problem). So he formulated a calculated response—using his small but deadly slingshot, for which Goliath’s size gave him no advantage at all.

Calculated vs. systematic response

Strategy as a calculated response is probably what comes to mind in a business or marketing context most often. Of course we should be calculated in what we’re doing—but even that notion gets mixed up sometimes.

A calculated response doesn’t simply mean that you thought about what were going to do. Because what are you calculating? You’re calculating how you’re going to overcome a problem, based on the resources available. In David vs. Goliath, David had to calculate how he was going to overcome his size disadvantage with the available resources—which is how we came up with this slingshot strategy.

Strategy as a systematic response is a little different but still related. In a systematic response, you’re still solving a problem, only the problem is a recurring problem that is best solved with a recurring solution.

In creative fields (which certainly includes business and marketing), recurring problems might include trouble generating ideas, maintaining quality output, inefficient expenditure of effort and resources, and aggressively deadlines.

I would say each recurring problem needs a systematic response, otherwise it becomes an intractable problem with compounding effects.

Take writer’s block. That could strike anyone. I guarantee the people who’ve overcome it or never deal with it in the first place have a system for dealing with it—could be a routine, a checklist, or better, a go-to solution that addresses the root cause of their writer’s block (feeling like they’re not good enough, exhaustion, inability to focus, etc). They have a strategy.

Strategy is everywhere

I recently came across an article or something featuring a “domestic strategist,” which I learned is someone who helps others design their home lives. Marie Kondo could rightly be called a domestic strategist who helped people deal with the problem of clutter in their homes—she developed and branded a systematic response called KonMari.

These days I find systems more pertinent than ever because they’re almost a form of unconscious calculation. All the thinking as has gone into the design of the system, but once designed, the system takes the thinking out of the problem-solving. It scales beautifully. That matters, because we’re all dealing with an escalating degree of digital and IRL clutter, fleeting time, mental and phsyical fatigue, and outright inertia.

We all need personal systems for dealing with these problems. We need personal strategies.