Priya wrote the grant, and she won it. Two years later, her best volunteers are at the school instead of the pantry, Saturday hours are cut, and the food-box waiting list is the longest it’s ever been. She never asked: what will this yes push out?

In this episode: why strategy means choosing (Roger Martin and Michael Porter); a three-question filter for any yes; three kinds of no (the clear no, the not-yet and the redirect); why no is so hard (loss aversion, scarcity, relationships); and why the aim isn’t to say no more, but to say yes on purpose.

The Pause: What’s the first thing I’d stop doing to make room for this? If you can’t name it, the yes isn’t free.

Try this week, your no list: three things you’ll say no to this month, and the sentence you’d use for each. Then say it out loud, once.

Play Yes Machine: run a small plumbing business for eight weeks and see what every yes costs. Free at play.mystrategysquad.com.

Further reading:

• Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley, Playing to Win (2013)
• Michael Porter, “What Is Strategy?” Harvard Business Review (1996)
• Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference (2016)
• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)
• Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity (2013)

Weekly notes at read.mystrategysquad.com.

Strategizing skills, without the suits. Everything’s free.

Play the free strategy games: play.mystrategysquad.com

Read the weekly notes: read.mystrategysquad.com

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Website: mystrategysquad.com

Strategizing Skills without the Suits.

Dale the plumber is sure his customers pick him because he’s cheap. It’s why he hasn’t raised his prices in four years. There’s just one thing: he’s never asked any of them. So he makes three calls, and not one customer mentions price.

In this episode: why we grab the first explanation and stop looking (Richard Rumelt calls it “quick closure”); why your edge is a hypothesis, a strong guess you test before you bet on it; three simple tests (ask, look at your losses, and the copy test); and why testing your own theory is so hard: optimism, sunk cost and friends who love you but aren’t your market.

The Pause: Before you commit more money, more months or more of your heart, ask: what would I need to see to know I’m wrong? Write it down and date it.

Try this week, three calls: Call two people who chose you and one who didn’t. Ask why they chose you, who else they considered, and what almost made them go elsewhere. Write down their exact words.

Further reading:

• Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy (2011), Chapters 16 and 17
• Richard Rumelt, The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists (2022)
• John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers (2020)

Play the free strategy games: play.mystrategysquad.com

Read the weekly notes: read.mystrategysquad.com

Watch Play-by-Play on Twitch: twitch.tv/mystrategysquad

Website: mystrategysquad.com

Strategizing Skills without the Suits.

Your board wants a strategic plan. So you spend six weekends on it: a revised vision and mission, five goals, twenty-three action items, a color-coded timeline. Forty pages. The board loves it. It goes on a shelf. Three months later, an opportunity turns up that isn’t in the plan, and nobody opens the binder.

Why? Because a plan isn’t a strategy. In this episode: where the idea that “strategy equals a plan” came from, why Henry Mintzberg said planning takes things apart while strategy puts them together, four words people use wrong (strategic, goal, mission and vision, tactics), and why even the experts can’t agree on what strategy means.

The Pause: Before the next plan goes anywhere, ask: what does this plan make us say no to? If the answer is “nothing,” it’s a wish list with dates on it.

Try this week, the plan autopsy: Take a plan you’ve got and mark every line G for goal, T for task, or C for choice. Then count your Cs.

Further reading:

• Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (1994)
• Henry Mintzberg, “The Strategy Concept I: Five Ps for Strategy,” California Management Review (1987)
• Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy (2011)
• Ronda-Pupo and Guerras-Martín, “Dynamics of the evolution of the strategy concept 1962–2008,” Strategic Management Journal (2012)

Strategizing skills, without the suits. Everything’s free: play the games at mystrategysquad.com, and join us on Twitch and Substack.

Play the free strategy games: play.mystrategysquad.com

Read the weekly notes: read.mystrategysquad.com

Watch Play-by-Play on Twitch: twitch.tv/mystrategysquad

Website: mystrategysquad.com

Strategizing Skills without the Suits.

Picture Dale, a plumber who says yes to every job and still can’t work out why he’s short on cash. And Priya, who runs a food pantry and writes a grant for a tutoring program because the money is there. Do they have a strategy? They’ve got the raw material of one. They made the choices, one by one. They just never saw them as a strategy.

This week’s idea: Strategy isn’t only a plan you write down. It’s the pattern in the decisions you actually make.

In this episode

• Strategy is what you do: Henry Mintzberg and the pattern in your decisions
• A goal is not a strategy: Richard Rumelt’s diagnosis, guiding approach and actions that fit together
• Strategy means saying no: Roger Martin and Michael Porter
• Strategy is a skill: Richard Whittington and strategy as practice
• The 4Cs: concepts, conduct, context, and composition

Try this week: the napkin test

1. Write what you think your strategy is, in three sentences.
2. List the toughest calls you made this year.
3. Compare. Where do your words and your decisions part ways?

Play: Yes Machine, free in your browser at play.mystrategysquad.com
Read: show notes and deeper dives at read.mystrategysquad.com
Ask Us: got a gap you’d share? Tell us at mystrategysquad.com. We treat everything you send as confidential, ask before we share, and change any detail that could identify you.

Sources

• Mintzberg, H. and Waters, J. A. (1985), “Of strategies, deliberate and emergent”, Strategic Management Journal6(3): 257-272.
• Mintzberg, H. (1987), “The strategy concept I: Five Ps for strategy”, California Management Review 30(1): 11-24.
• Rumelt, R. P. (2011), Good Strategy/Bad Strategy.
• Lafley, A. G. and Martin, R. L. (2013), Playing to Win.
• Porter, M. E. (1996), “What is strategy?”, Harvard Business Review 74(6): 61-78.
• Whittington, R. (1996), “Strategy as practice”, Long Range Planning 29(5): 731-735.
• The 4Cs build on Pettigrew (1987), Moore (1995) and Khalifa (2008). Composition, the fourth C, is ours.
• The title echoes Markides, C. (2004), “What is strategy and how do you know if you have one?”, Business Strategy Review 15(2): 5-12.

Dale and Priya are invented. Their situations aren’t.

Play the free strategy games: play.mystrategysquad.com

Read the weekly notes: read.mystrategysquad.com

Watch Play-by-Play on Twitch: twitch.tv/mystrategysquad

Website: mystrategysquad.com

Strategizing Skills without the Suits.

Quick question. What's your strategy? If you said a plan, a goal or "to grow", most of those answers aren't a strategy at all. Not even a bad one.

My Strategy Squad is free strategy coaching for small business owners, startup founders and nonprofit staff: the people who do it all, with no strategy department and no consultants. I'm Andrew David Roberts. I've run companies, been a partner in consulting firms and a director of nonprofits.

This show puts the human side of strategy first: how optimism, fear and uncertainty get in the way, and how to pause before you decide. One idea, one story from the trenches, one thing to try. About ten minutes, every Tuesday.

Episode 1 arrives Tuesday, November 3.

Play the free strategy games: play.mystrategysquad.com

Read the weekly notes: read.mystrategysquad.com

Watch Play-by-Play on Twitch: twitch.tv/mystrategysquad

Website: mystrategysquad.com

Strategizing Skills without the Suits.