The Strategy Instinct

I'm going to let you in on a dirty little secret.

I've been selling strategy advice for about 15 years now. And of course, if you ever asked me, I'd tell you strategy was extremely important.

It's how you differentiate from competitors! It's how you give clarity and direction to the team! It's how you capture part of the market!

Yes, I'd tell you all this - but if you want to know the truth?

Strategy is a luxury good.

It's something that very ambitious and creative leaders would go in for, to take their business from good to great. But for most? They simply wouldn't bother. Because the alternative - being reactive, hustling, iterating, copying - often works just fine.

It works fine because, out there in the real world - away from the textbooks and LinkedIn posts - just being diligent and taking action has been enough to win. Most people (and most companies) are too slow, disorganised, or distracted to do even a mediocre job.

And so, mediocre wins.

This is the reason you don't see a huge market of people like me - pure strategy advisors. The demand just isn't all that big.

But now, something's changing.

I'm sure you feel it.

Social, political, and above all technological churn is changing the landscape beneath our feet. We aren't quite sure where it's going, or what the end state is, but one thing is becoming pretty clear:

Barriers to entry are dropping.

Building is cheaper.
Analysis is instant.
Iteration is rapid.

Tasks that took hours now take minutes. Projects that took years now take months. And mediocrity - that standard that used to be difficult to achieve - is now becoming frighteningly accessible.

Business leaders like us used to be able to relax, knowing that yes, OK, what we're doing isn't all that special or defensible - but hey, nobody else is going to do it, so no worries! And if they did? Well, it would take them ages, plenty of time for us to react and defend ourselves.

This is not the world that's coming.

In fact, it's not really the world we live in now. We can no longer rely on hard work and diligence to be our moat. These things are commodities.

And so what's left?

Just one thing. The luxury good. The thing that was always a nice-to-have is now perhaps the only thing to have:

The unique way you think.

…aka, strategy.

It can be tempting of course to call this a commodity too. After all, can't we just get AI to "do the strategy for us"? It's swallowed all the books, the frameworks, the models. So can't it just tell us what to do?

The short answer is: no. But the longer answer is that even if it could do that, so what? We'd be right back where we started, with zero advantage - as everyone ran the same processes into competitive oblivion.

It is an iron law of the universe that whatever is easy, cheap, and abundant, instantly loses value.

It can never be the thing that gives you an advantage. It can never be the thing that makes you win.

The only thing that can ever make you win, is the thing others don't have.

And today that thing is you.

You are the competitive advantage. The way you think. The way you act. Your unique point of view. Your courage. Your creativity. Your leadership. This is what is rare. And this is what drives great strategy.

In fact when you think about it, it really doesn't matter how technology evolves. Because when you dig deep enough, underneath all of it, there's always going to be a person pulling the strings. And it's the choices of that person that will really count.

That person won't simply be following a "framework", or a "process" that anyone could do. Truth is even before AI, even before Google, such things were easily accessible and they didn't really make a difference to most people who learned them. No matter how many books they read, they still couldn't do it.

No, the thing that's always made the difference is not the knowledge, but the mindset of the person wielding the knowledge.

Their instinct.

We know this because some people - the legendary founders and CEOs whose names we all know instantly - have this instinct naturally. That's why they were able to outmanoeuvre armies of MBAs without any technical "strategy knowledge" at all.

But the rest of us?

We have to learn it.

And that learning starts here.

In this short ebook, I'm going to break down the strategic instinct for you. The things that really drive competitive advantage, and underpin legendary brands. Not the stuff you'll get in a textbook.

This is the stuff that counted yesterday, counts today, and is really going to count tomorrow.

I know because I've seen it - working my way up from advising failing one-person startups to companies like Porsche and Microsoft, and everything in between. What I'm going to lay out here is what I've noticed truly moves the needle.

And if you stay with me, through this book, through my newsletter, and perhaps beyond, these are the gifts that shall be yours.

What defines the truly strategic mind?

Four habits. Not a framework or checklist, but a unified stack of behaviours that come together in what I'm referring to here as an instinct. Each one flows into the next, and without any single one, the whole thing collapses.

These are:

Contrarianism
Courage
Charisma
Consistency

In that order.

The order matters because each one triggers a different stage of the kind of strategic action that builds a powerful, high-leverage business:

Contrarianism → Creates the strategy
Courage → Commits to the strategy
Charisma → Executes the strategy
Consistency → Compounds the strategy

Remove one, and the ones before or after become useless.

Without contrarianism, you'll never actually have an idea we can reasonably call "a strategy" in the first place. The remaining steps become pointless - unless perhaps you have the strategy handed to you by someone else.

Without courage, you might have the idea, but you'll never quite go for it. You'll water it down. You'll procrastinate. You'll "do more research". You'll wobble.

Without charisma, basically nobody will listen to you, and so the thing won't actually happen. It takes a whole organisation pulling together to bring a strategic idea to life, and this is much harder than simply "telling them the plan".

And without consistency, the whole thing dissolves. Maybe not after a week. Maybe not after six months. But sooner or later, without it, everything you've built returns to the formless sludge from whence it came.

Together, you can think of this as the human operating system that sits behind every remarkable iconic business - regardless of the framework, tools, or tech employed in its creation.

Now let's see how, specifically.

I could have just as easily called this one "creativity", because it's another "C" of course, and it does the same job. I could have also said "imagination" if I wasn't hung up on the whole "C" thing.

But I felt contrarianism was more specific and helpful, so I went with that.

To understand why this is important, you must understand what good strategy looks like.

In my view, there's no clearer way of explaining it than this:

Great strategy is how you give customers something they want, but can't get from anyone else but you.

Let's think about that a second. First, every company needs to give people something they want. That's obvious. That's the value. That's what they're paying for. Pretty simple.

But what most leaders miss is that this isn't enough. If you give people something they want, but they can also get it from lots of other places, then it's worthless. You're just doubling, tripling, or quadrupling up on what's already there. You're a leech. A parasite. You just want to get a piece of the pie, rather than giving the world something new.

That's why it's so important they can't get this thing anywhere else but you. You need to be the only game in town.

Achieve this? You win.

You don't even need to be that good frankly. Because after all, people who want what you're selling have no choice - you can acquire them as customers easily and cheaply, and they'll pay pretty much what you want.

And that's a great business.

There's only one catch. Finding an idea that does this is very, very hard.

There aren't many opportunities of this nature hanging from trees waiting to be picked. Most markets are extremely mature and well-served. Over-served even. There just aren't many things people want that haven't already been given to them a dozen times over.

So what do you do?

Well, I'll tell you what you don't do. You don't follow the same thought process as everyone else. You don't just gather data, do research, talk to customers, try to serve them better, address pain points, add features, cut prices, and all the other linear, obvious crap that passes for "strategy" in most organisations.

Just think about it. If you ask the same questions as your competitors, what are you going to get?

The same answers.

You may be able to implement these "insights" better than your competitors, but "better" isn't strategic, and it lacks leverage. The market interprets it as "the same". We're trying to be the only.

The only way we do that is by generating new answers from new questions. We have to think the opposite of our competitors. We have to be contrarian.

Here's how:

Think at an industry level, not customer level. Strategy's job is not to "serve the customer", but to "serve the industry" - meaning you seek flaws in the market that you can repair. Or in other words, gaps you can fill. This means you need to be thinking about the industry landscape in its entirety - where is it crowded, where is it empty, which way are things moving, and so on. This "10,000 feet view" is essential, but 99% of people are thinking at a much lower altitude.

Think beyond the norms. Every market is full of things that are done a certain way just because that's how they've always been done. Most people never question these "invisible rules" - like how a fish never questions water. But we need to first notice these arbitrary constraints, then question them, and imagine what things might look like if they were removed or different.

Be prepared to disagree. We need to disagree with our competitors - and often even our customers. They all value certain things: certain offerings, services, priorities, results. We need to ask the question: what if these don't matter? What if there's something more interesting that we cannot see until we let go of the old priorities? Something seemingly "good" must always be killed to create space for something great.

Turn the contrarianism on yourself. Find the benefits not only in your strengths, but your weaknesses. The breakthrough for many businesses comes not in knowing what they're good at, but in embracing what they're bad at - and imagining what would be unlocked if they became even worse.

Fundamentally, true strategy is always a game of imagining what could be.

What might be.
What should be.

Not what has been, or what is.

This means it's always a game of questioning and rejecting what's gone before. And therefore it's always a game of contrarianism.

It's tempting to think that the idea is the hard part of the process - but it isn't.

I learned this through my own career. When I first started out, I would give strategies to my clients, and they would always, invariably, agree to them. But then what?

Nothing happened.

They never actually committed. They never actually did what we agreed. One way or another the idea would just dissolve and they'd end up right back where they started.

The fundamental issue here was lack of courage: the courage to pick one direction, decisively, at the expense of everything else.

This point about expense is key, because real strategy normally involves rejecting a bunch of other possibilities. If you're a video game company and you decide to own in-person party gaming, then you're rejecting dominance in online gaming. If you're an airline and you decide to focus on families, you're rejecting business travellers.

Every strategy has trade-offs. Every strategy involves saying "no" to something that is fundamentally good and desirable.

Equally, every strategy has the potential to fail. You're proposing something nobody's ever done before, so of course there's a bit of risk involved. That's unavoidable.

This combination of:

Rejecting certain things that are good
+
Committing to something that might go wrong

…explains why choosing a strategy requires courage, and most people won't actually do it even if the most perfect idea ever is handed to them on a platter.

So what do they choose instead?

This is where things get really tricky, because there's an alternative to strategy which has the potential to improve your business with no trade-offs and no risk. I call it "the coward's strategy", but you might simply call it:

Optimisation.

Optimisation is what most businesses are actually doing when they claim they're doing "strategy". In a nutshell, it involves:

Doing what you're currently doing, better.

This is seductive because 1) it seems smart, 2) you don't have to give anything up, and 3) it can't really go wrong. If you just make a long list of commitments to:

Improve sales conversions!
Add product features!
Handle customer service better!
Expand into a new territory!

…then the worst-case scenario is that things basically stay the same as they are now.

Now I'm not saying you shouldn't do all these things. Perhaps you should. But the problem is that this approach yields no competitive advantage, doesn't focus the organisation in any particular way, creates no inspiring narrative, and above all has extremely limited upside.

A true strategic play could grow the business by many multiples. But successful optimisation of the status quo will deliver, what, maybe 10% growth on where you are now?

But even so, this is what most "leaders" choose - because they can call it "strategy" even though it takes no courage, no creativity, no inspiration.

The truth is this isn't really leadership at all. Leadership involves leading people into unknown territory, a place they've never been before. Optimisation is merely management - staying in the same place you are now, but improving execution.

If you're content to be a manager, then that's fine. It's an equally legitimate and important role within the business ecosystem.

But if you see yourself as a leader then - by definition - you must pick somewhere uncharted and risky to lead your people to. You literally cannot be a leader without this. And this is what a strategy gives you: your destination, the substance of your leadership.

That's why courage is central to the process. There's no such thing as a "strategy" without it.

We are playing a game of adventure, speculation, mischief, and dare I even say, romance. So of course you should feel a sense of trepidation when setting out.

In many ways, it's why we do it.

So you've had the idea (contrarianism).

And you've committed to the idea (courage).

Now it's time to actually do the idea, and this is the realm of charisma. Sounds a bit weird, because charisma isn't exactly a "doing" word — but for the most part it isn't going to be you doing the doing, it's going to be your team.

And to get them firing? Charisma is everything.

The basic thing to understand here is this: your team doesn't care about the company.

I mean why should they? Most of them will never get to the top of it. They'll never own a piece of it. They have lives. They have other concerns. This is just a job.

Furthermore, most people in general don't really like "thinking strategically". It's just not the way their brains work - they're more into the detail than the big picture, and that's probably how you need them.

Put these things together, and you can see why you can't just "tell people the strategy" and expect them to start operating in alignment with it. They'll just nod along and then go right back to whatever they were doing before. Inertia, after all, is the most powerful force in the world.

Charisma is the antidote to this. But not simply your charisma as a leader — the charisma of the strategy itself.

There are some ideas that you remember the first time, that you understand completely, and that just light you up. Ideas you'd love to be a part of. These are the kinds of ideas that stick in an organisation — and that teams adapt to with very little effort.

Think for example of iconic companies like Apple, Red Bull, SpaceX, that kind of thing. Even as outsiders, we all more or less "get" these companies. And we can all see how it would be exciting to be part of what they're doing. This comes as a result of the charisma of their strategies, which are so powerful they actually leak out into the wider world.

Well, we need a bit of that magic too if we ever want this thing to actually happen.

How?

The good news is that if you've done a real strategy — created through contrarianism and committed to with courage — then you're already halfway there. True strategies are naturally charismatic, since they involve a bit of mischief and disruption.

People love to be part of ventures like this, provided they aren't responsible for them. And that's great, because you're the one who's responsible, so it's already a pretty easy sell.

Next, however, you need to narrativise the strategy. You do this like so:

Give it an enemy. You need to get explicit about what the business is attacking with this strategy. This could be a prevailing orthodoxy in the category, a certain competitor, or a problem in the world that's being solved. It doesn't really matter, so long as it's very clear what you're against. People will latch onto this and remember it.

Give it a non-financial destination. You need to identify a "good thing that will happen" if the strategy is successful. This good thing can't be "our shareholders will grow rich". It has to be something your average employee will be somewhat motivated by. It could be a change to the market landscape, a change in your customers' lives, or some sort of larger social good. You just need to think about what the side effects would be if your strategy was insanely successful, and pick the most compelling one.

Give it an arc. You need to knit these elements together into a story structure with a beginning, middle, and end. You're creating a myth of the business, which you and the team are acting out. Everyone unwittingly lives inside myths. They choose their actions based on some sort of story they're living up to. So within the organisation you need to create that story, and then people will start living up to it without even trying.

The basic arc structure is something like:

Origin: where you all started.
Enemy: the bad thing you noticed.
Solution: basically the main act of your strategy.
Destination: what will happen if we're successful.

This is the thing you start peddling to the organisation. This is the thing you need to give some pomp and theatre to.

Make videos, do speeches, paint murals, hammer it home from every angle — and make no mistake, people will start drifting into execution automatically, without the need for cajoling or micromanagement.

Every great brand you can think of is living out a myth. This myth is just a sexed-up version of their strategy. And it is this that bestows charisma on the idea, and makes it actually happen.

Plus, when the narrative is powerful enough, it doesn't just align the team — it starts to leak out. Customers feel it. Investors feel it. The press picks up on it. The strategy stops being an internal document and starts becoming the thing the company is known for. That's when you can relax. Sort of…

Now here's the part where you'd expect me to say something boring about discipline and focus. And yes, these are the things that will make the strategy bed-in, compound, and actually deliver results.

But beyond that, consistency is actually quite a radical idea right now.

Think about it. We live in a world of relentless novelty. New trends, new tools, new competitors, new "pivots". Everyone is chasing the next thing. The entire culture of business is geared towards restlessness.

At a low level, a tactical level, it's good to be restless and experimenting. But at a strategic level, the level that defines what your business is actually for and its place in the world, you need to be glassy-still.

It's your ability to stay the course like this — never getting bored, never tired — that protects you from the two acids that dissolve even the very best ideas: drift, and competition.

Drift. At some point — maybe in a few weeks, maybe in a few months — your focus will start to erode. Even with a charismatic myth, it's still going to happen. People are magpies. All sorts of harmless little ideas will pop up which seem good on the face of it, even if they aren't precisely aligned with the strategy. None of them will do much harm by themselves. But taken together, over time, they will return you to the generic mush from whence you came. And worst of all, you won't even notice it's happening.

Competition. No matter how contrarian or radical your strategy, people will copy you. Southwest executed pretty much the greatest strategy in history to create the low-cost airlines category — but how crowded is that space now? Apple revolutionised computing and phones — but can an iPhone do anything today that a cheaper Android can't do better? Hard competitive advantage never lasts.

But consistency protects you on both counts.

First, obviously, it defends against drift. And it doesn't only stop you from becoming muddled, it actually deepens all the time. Each year your myth and market position become ever more clear, vivid, and intense.

This in turn deals with the competition issue, through the formulation of an unassailable brand.

Brand is what gives your business competitive advantage over the long term, when the market's responded and everyone's caught up. If you are sufficiently consistent and aggressive with your strategy, then you quickly become synonymous with it, and you claim ownership of the territory even after others have piled in.

I mean come on, are any of these awesome companies we've referenced actually unique? No.

But they still have immense power because of their brand association with what they do. Inertia is the most powerful force in the world — and with consistency, it works to your advantage.

To tell the truth, most people don't have this in them. They get twitchy. They want something new. They start "evolving the strategy" six months in, which is just a polite way of saying they're abandoning it.

The ones who stay? They win everything.

What I've just explained is real strategy.

Not a framework. Not a process. An instinct — with four dimensions that work as one.

If you truly embodied this, you'd never have to read another book. Beyond understanding some very basic principles around what strategy "is", you'd have little else to do other than being yourself.

(And by the way, if you want to do that, my book No Bullsh*t Strategy will give you everything you need to know in just 138 silky-smooth pages.)

Such people do exist. We can all name one or two.

But are you one of them?

Statistically, probably not.

But that's OK.

Because this instinct can be developed. And that's what I'm here for.