Pinching Off Suckers - What Good Strategy Is and What Strategists Do

“Strategy” is one of those squishy, slippery words that means a dozen things to a dozen people, based on books they’ve read or their most recent experience. The word “strategist” isn’t much better. What the heck does a strategist do?

I recall a series of meetings in 2018 wherein the resident “strategist,” easily the least helpful person in the room, tossed out ideas like hand grenades. When the real work began later, he performed his famous disappearing act.

It only takes one bad apple, as the saying goes, and strategy is similar to used cars or timeshares in that what people actually get may not resemble what they thought they were buying.

Now that I am a strategist myself, I sometimes assume a role last occupied by someone who provided next to no practical value. The CEO or founder who hired me might still be bullish on “strategy,” but the rest of the team needs convincing.

Like a good puppy or teacher, a good strategy can change your life, so one of the first things I do to restore faith is provide clear working definitions of “strategy” and “strategist.” I’ll share them here.

What is strategy?

I define strategy as the path to superior results.

Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi provided the raw material for this definition. Running a $200 billion global company taught her a thing or two about good and bad strategy. Here is the relevant excerpt from the interview I listened to:

“And that’s the challenge with strategy. You’ve almost got to have a 360-degree view of the environment, of competition, of the markets, of customer revolution, everything else. And then you’re crafting a path to say, ‘This is how we should proceed. This is why it’s going to be better for us than it is today. And incidentally, if the world around us changes, we’re going to zag a little bit, but we’re still going to focus on getting to a better place.’” (bold mine).

I take the idea of a “better place” or superior results one step further by tacking an important idea from Michael Porter’s classic 1996 Harvard Business Review article, “What Is Strategy?”: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

Strategy is the path to superior results, and to walk that path, you must consciously ignore other paths.

That principle of growth by subtraction became the foundation of my approach to strategy. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the principle is the fulcrum and strategy is the lever. Together, they give you better results with less effort.

Once I understood growth by subtraction, I realized that I had already brushed up against the principle in a hundred observations and a thousand conversations. In every domain, from investing and athletics to agriculture and spirituality, growth by subtraction appears. An apparel company grows faster after the CEO decides to focus exclusively on socks and not diversify to other garments. A Michelin star chef sends a message with the pre fixe menu: ”This isn’t Cheesecake Factory. We offer fewer dishes, and we execute them much better.”

When I was a boy working with my grandmother in her garden, she instructed me to pinch off the suckers that grew between the bigger branches and stems. Why? Fewer suckers meant bigger tomatoes later.

Businesses sprout their share of suckers. They intercept resources that could have gone to a single strategy more likely to produce superior results or a step change in growth.

The trouble is, in business, some suckers are diversions, distractions, and dead ends, and some of them are pretty good options. It’s not until you compare the possible paths to one another and hold them up against your goals that you see lesser paths for what they are.

Founders and CEOs can lead this process or do this comparison on their own, but there are a couple of reasons they face several challenges:

• Visionary gift. A CEO’s expansive vision, which is required to see many forks and offshoots, can get in the way when it’s time to pick a single path and walk resolutely down it.
• Complexity. Companies and strategies grow organically over time, and complexity starts to seem necessary and realistic, even if complexity doesn’t scale.
• Sunk cost bias. The more time and resources that you invest in certain underperforming products or tactics, the harder pruning them becomes.
• Blind spots. When it’s your company, you’re under the curse of familiarity, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t attain true objectivity and see what you’ve been missing.
• Agreeable team members. It’s hard for full-time employees whose livelihoods are on the line to say to their opinionated CEOs, “That looks like a shiny object to me.”

Some leaders overcome these challenges on their own, and some bring in an unafraid outsider with the expertise and outside insights needed to identify the suckers, pinch them off, and run the new strategy. Even a good strategy can’t produce superior results if the team drifts from their commitment to it.

What do good strategists do?

If strategy is the path to superior results, and one that must be consciously chosen again and again, then a strategist is a person who finds the path to superior results and reminds the team what they’re not doing.

To be more specific, a strategist has four main responsibilities:

1. Define “superior results”—and get everyone to agree on that.
2. Take inventory of possibilities and pathways.
3. Pick the one that seems best—and get everyone to agree on it.
4. Communicate the strategy in plain English.

It’s shockingly easy to optimize for the wrong things in any business. Several examples come to mind. One of my clients ran a promotion that attracted the cost-conscious customers they didn’t want. Another client prioritized growth over profitability, and rising customer acquisition costs (CAC) combined with frequent discounting and debt service created a serious cashflow problem.

“Superior results” means “better” or “different” as often as “more”—better profits, different customers, better products, different marketing channels. “Superior results” can mean higher revenue, but it can also mean a shorter, easier sales cycle or a single channel partner driving hundreds of sales.

So one of my first tasks is to get everyone to slow down long enough to decide what success looks like really. We have a name for growth for its own sake, ”cancer.” Is more-more-more the goal? Or do we need to sharpen the team’s understanding of how we’re defining and measuring desirable change?

Here are five examples of superior results that emerged during my client engagements:

• Food company: “Get to $500,000 by December 2026”
• Pet supplement company: “Get revenue to $15,000 per month”
• SaaS company: “Build brand awareness and drive signups by forming strategic partnerships”
• Franchise company: “Use a live monthly webinar to build trust before leads come to disclosure calls”
• First-aid company: “Create a differentiated brand and launch a better-for-you product then court Walgreens as our preferred retailer”

What never ceases to amaze me is that the strategy best suited for those results often isn’t novel. Though I like to ask, “What else could we do?” and entertain new possibilities and pathways, I know better than to assume that a radically innovative strategy will be the winner.

The winner is often hidden in plain view, like a wheelbarrow in an overgrown garden. You know you have a wheelbarrow, but you don’t remember it until a neighbor asks to borrow it. Oh yeah. You could have been using it this whole time.

The strategist defines the goals and facilitates conversation around possible pathways, and then the strategist eliminates lesser pathways and creates consensus around the one best suited for the goals.

But let me be very clear on one point: Good strategy assumes confidence, not certainty, and a strategist helps you pick a strategy on that basis. Every twist, turn, and tactic of the chosen path will not be clear before you start walking on it.

The right strategy is one part feasible and one part uncomfortable. You will know the what and the why, but you won’t know all of the how. The right strategy forces you to recognize that you don’t know everything or everyone you need to know. You don’t have everything you need.

The right strategy challenges the status quo. It requires both you and your team to change.

Strategists are therefore agents of change, and consensus building is the unsung competency that good strategists have. A good strategy does nothing unless it gets implemented, and implementation requires people, their buy-in or belief at a high level, their optimism at the ground level, their willingness to abandon the old strategy, and their willingness to embrace the changes that the new strategy entails.

Assuming you give her the leeway, a strategist can help executive leaders smooth ruffled feathers, even with her presence alone. Her presence says, “This isn’t another one of our visionary founder’s harebrained schemes. This is a legitimate strategy with real thinking and rigor behind it, and real implications for the company. We will all benefit if I get on board and do my part.”

A strategy written in plain English goes a long way toward building consensus. People can’t get excited about the strategy if they are confused. They can’t remember the strategy if the handful of people who understand it best needed eighty slides to communicate it to everyone else.

In his book No Bullsh*t Strategy Alex M.H. Smith writes about this PowerPoint problem. When we don’t understand the strategy well enough, we think we must expound upon it with pretty designs, diagrams, and sundry declarations. Smith says, in effect, “Please don’t.” The better test for whether you understand the strategy is communicating it in plain English.

My clients have gotten better results with their strategies when the strategy “deliverable” was a document unremarkable in every way, except in its clarity. I prefer a one-page GDoc or Word doc with the rationale explained in a few short paragraphs and the strategy itself summarized in one or two sentences, ideally composed of one- and two-syllable words.

Plain, concise English does a few things for you. It’s easy to understand for folks inside and outside your company. There’s no corporatespeak or embellishment that obscures what’s being said. Half the battle with the new strategy is keeping it from becoming as complicated and confusing as the old one. The brevity leaves less room for misinterpretation and ensures that fewer people try to duck their responsibility, claiming that they didn’t know what they were supposed to do.

Plain English has one final benefit worth mentioning. It leaves strategists and executives with no place to hide. If we don’t understand the strategy well enough to state it in plain English, then we can’t blame the people responsible for implementing it for not implementing it.

If the strategist gives you a page that your nine-year-old nephew or ninety-year-old grandma can grasp, then she did her job.

So in summary, good strategists help their clients define superior results. Then, they pick the most promising pathway. Then, they get everyone to agree on it. Then, they communicate the strategy succinctly in plain English. Then, they stick around to help the team maintain their commitment to it. Or not. Their ongoing presence and support depends on your budget.

When you’re ready to grow by subtraction using a 1-page strategy written in plain English, email me at hello[at]austinlchurch[dot]com.