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.

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Website: mystrategysquad.com

Strategizing Skills without the Suits.