Why does nobody care about strategy?

As someone who’s spent a decade writing about this stuff, I can give you a very simple explanation:

Because it’s not important.

(Or at least it hasn’t been until very recently - which I’ll come onto in a sec…)

Strategy being unimportant is just the unavoidable conclusion when we think about it for 2 seconds.

If it mattered?

People would care about it.

But it doesn’t.

And so they don’t.

This is evidenced by some super obvious data points:

1. Most businesses have no discernible strategy. But many of them are still super successful. If you can be successful without strategy, who cares?

2. There are almost no pure play strategy advisory firms. If there was a market demand for this stuff, that wouldn’t be true. But there’s no market demand, and so this is a bad business to get into (take it from me)

So yeah - nobody understands strategy, but largely this is because they just don’t care. If hustle and tactics is enough to win, then that’s what we’ll focus on.

But…

…is this still true?

The importance of strategy is determined by one single factor:

• The intensity of competition

The higher this rises, the more strategic you need to be to succeed.

Historically this intensity was low enough that you could get away with being non-strategic. But now, in most industries, things are heating up to such a frenzy that tactics…. they just don’t cut it anymore.

Maybe it’s wishful thinking by me, but I think we’re about the enter the era of strategy.

The era where thinking actually counts.

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