I came across Shreyas Doshi’s tweet, which challenged the common mantra that “execution is more important than strategy.” This got me thinking about how strategy works in organizations.
When I read “Understanding Michael Porter” and arrived at the section on strategic fit, I had an insight that tied several threads of my learning journey together.
In my previous experience as a brand manager, I learned that a brand is not just a logo or a tagline — it manifests itself in every interaction with the customer. The website, the packaging, the retail experience, and customer support: every touchpoint needs to be “on brand.”
Reading “Understanding Michael Porter” and the section on strategic fit, I realized: strategy, like brand, lives in the choices people make every day.
The micro-moments of strategy
Strategy shows itself in small choices:
- A developer deciding which technical debts to tackle now and which to tackle later
- A designer choosing which patterns to standardize and which to customize
- A support specialist knowing when to follow protocol and when to make exceptions
These micro-decisions add up. They are the dark matter of organizations — invisible, yet an essential part of what determines the success or failure of strategy.
Strategy as a background hum
This realization led me to understand why clarity in strategy is so important.
A brilliant company does not require everyone to recite the strategy verbatim. Instead, the strategy acts like a background hum — a clearly defined strategy creates alignment and gives people the freedom to act confidently.
“Good strategy can actually free startups up to move faster by making it clear exactly what the company wants to do, and for whom, and giving autonomy to the talented people it hires by letting them select their own coherent actions that fit within the strategy.”
This works if the strategy creates clarity. Not the fake clarity of platitudes (“we deliver exceptional customer experiences!”), but the painful clarity of trade-offs.
What will we not do? Which customers will we not serve? Which opportunities will we deliberately ignore?
A strategy without sharp edges is not a strategy. It’s wishful thinking.
Strategy in daily decisions
When companies separate strategy from execution, they create a model with centralized intelligence. A few “smart” people decide and everyone else implements it.
This hierarchical approach may have worked in the industrial age, but it is terribly slow for our time.
The best teams are fast not because they are told what to do but because they understand the strategy well enough to act on their own.
Strategy is not a department. It is not limited to management meetings. It is about having a framework in which the right decisions— can be made - anywhere and at any time.
The organizations that win not only have better strategies but also better strategy distribution. They recognize that each team member is a strategist in their field, making small decisions that collectively determine the fate of the business by either reinforcing or undermining planned direction.