What is Strategy?
Explore the core concept of strategy and its role in shaping your tech career. Understand how to define clear goals, diagnose key challenges, and create coherent plans that help you decide where to focus your efforts. This lesson guides you through recognizing good versus bad strategies to improve decision-making and career planning.
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Strategy
There are a lot of definitions of strategy out there, and only some of them are good. We are in the corporate business-speak territory, after all! Let me quote a few:
- The strategy is the problem of choosing problems.
- Strategy answers: “What should we be doing?”
- Strategy defines where to play and how to win.
Aspects of strategy
There are four aspects of strategy:
- A mental model of present reality - where you, your competitors, and the larger technological landscape are and are going
- A vision of the future - where you want to go
- A plan for getting from here to there
- A policy - choosing what to do and what not to do with a clear rationale and understanding of tradeoffs
📝 Note: This was first formulated by Henry Mintzberg as plan, pattern, position, and perspective - because business types love alliteration - with the 5th P for “ploy” added for decoy/fakeout plays. I have redefined these elements to be more applicable for tech strategy and your personal career strategy.
It helps to know what are good and bad strategies. Fortunately, there’s a book for just that.
Good strategy
A good strategy:
- Is simple and obvious; it says no to the complexity
- Has a theory or diagnosis on the key challenge to overcome
- Includes guiding policies and actions to take to overcome the key challenge
- Is coherent; all actions reinforce and support each other rather than compete
Bad strategy
A bad strategy:
- Has a bunch of fluff, corporate business-speak
- Fails to face the challenge, the central problem the company faces
- Mistakes goals for strategy, statements of desire rather than concrete plans (we will get it if just we want it hard enough)
- Has objectives that fail to address critical issues (because they are inconvenient)