1. Strategy-related terms: Less marketing – more customering
In the 20th century, business strategy resembled military strategy.
– Seize territory
– Defeat competitors
– Treat customer acquisition and retention costs as collateral damage
Marketing functioned like military intelligence.
If you study your competitors today, you’re digging into what they thought yesterday.
Today, your focal point should be the customer’s needs and pain points.
And marketing should be renamed to customering.
Strategy = customering.
2. Strategy as Philosophy: Strategy isn’t a recipe, it’s a cookbook
In the 1960s, the US and Europe had 5+ car and appliance makers and 10+ clothing brands.
The main strategic challenges were to win the competition and to sell more stuff.
SWOT, PEST, BCG, and other “business hopscotch” were great at helping business leaders find all the crucial answers.
In today’s brutal competition, the goal isn’t to make customers buy our products but to make products they want to buy.
Here’s the thing: modern strategy isn’t about answering “what should you do?” It’s about “how should we think?”
If someone gives you the same recipe for a startup, a tech company, or a concrete plant—don’t buy it.
3. Strategy and Value Exchange: The stock market is its own playground
In many languages, trading stocks on the exchange is called “playing the stock market.”
For example, in French: jouer en bourse, in German: an der Börse spielen, and in Italian: giocare in borsa.
This is a game where some guys try to outsmart others by using any news, good or bad, to buy and sell stocks and capitalize on it.
Over the last few days, hundreds of companies saw their market value rise and fall.
It had nothing to do with their business.
Their products didn’t become worse or better.
Their financial state didn’t change.
Sooner or later, markets will calm down, and we’ll have more time to think about the simple fact – the link between two playgrounds, business and the stock market, was broken years ago.
So, when I read that “XYZ’s stock has risen,” or “fallen,” I don’t pay much attention.
4. Thursday musings: The best doctors cure diseases. The richest invent them
Big consulting firms coined the “unpredictable future” to sell you a “strategy of adaptiveness.”
But uncertainty and unpredictability are built into the very nature of the world.
You have all you need to live and thrive: creativity, imagination, and nimbleness. Just use them.
Teaching you to be an adaptive leader is like teaching a fish to swim.
You need this “strategy of adaptiveness” cure only if you overdosed on the one they sold you decades ago: business planning.
Download my new mini-book The Plague of Strategic Goals for free here—a gift for my subscribers! Oh, and by the way, the same link also has free checklists (in case you haven’t grabbed them yet)!
Svyatoslav Biryulin
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I help businesses scale fast by creating new markets. Want to brainstorm new strategic or product ideas but need the right facilitator to lead the session? DM me.
Read also: Fake Marketing Leads to Real Failure
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