Strategy Is the Story of a Company Written About Its Future

Five days a week, I share short notes on business strategy on Substack Notes and LinkedIn. Here’s the collection of the best notes from 2024. Find your New Year’s gift at the end of the article.

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“You don’t rise to the levels of your goals. You fall to the levels of your systems.” James Clear, ‘Atomic Habits’. Business strategy is not about setting bold goals. It's about building a system that enables growth and development.

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When executives say they don't have time for strategic thinking, they're akin to parents who say they don't have time for their children or spouses who don't have time for each other. They will all regret it eventually.

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Your best customers are not the most generous, the richest, or the most numerous. Your best customers are the ones for whom you can create more value than your rivals.

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Love your customers. They are the only stakeholders who bring money into your business. All the rest take it away.

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First and foremost, strategy is a shared agreement among company leaders. Without this agreement, they can't work together effectively.

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Management is about influencing people so that they voluntarily do what is needed.

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It’s not the author’s words that make a book great, but the readers’ reactions. And it’s not profit that makes a business great, but the love and loyalty of its customers.

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Planning is an activity that feeds into our illusion that the world will conform to our desires.

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Innovation is a value exchange. You trade your attention to your customers’ needs for their loyalty to your products.

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All strategies are wrong in the long run. What truly matters is what we learn along the way.

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If we create a successful business, we’ll positively impact a few lives. If that business delivers groundbreaking products, we’ll make a meaningful difference in many lives. And if this business delivers groundbreaking products and we also help our employees grow and learn, we’ll touch countless lives in profound ways.

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The future is when all our current data, ideas, and conclusions will become completely outdated.

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When people are singing in chorus, it's beautiful. But they're all singing the same tune. You don't need a choir for strategic decisions—you need some dissonance.

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A company can't develop faster than its employees. Employees can't develop faster than their leader. Do you develop fast enough?

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One of the biggest misconceptions in management is believing that employees work for a company. This is like thinking that the citizens of a country work for its government.

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You don’t need employees who love their job. You need employees who love your customers. If they love your customers, they’ll love their job, too.

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Our success is defined not so much by our goals' ambitiousness but by the scale of change that doesn't scare us.

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If consumers know what they want, we call it ‘demand.’ Meeting demands means working with only one part of the potential market.

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Those who don’t understand customers just sell. Those who do make a profit.

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A contrarian take – a company doesn't work to achieve its goals; it achieves its goals to solve a bigger task: building a business that will create value for key stakeholders for decades.

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Strategy doesn’t lead you to the goal. Strategy helps you improve your systems. And systems take you to the goal.

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If you don’t make customers the center of your universe, they’ll become someone else’s.

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A good detective looks for motives. A good marketer looks for unmet needs. A good strategist looks for unsolved problems.

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Business is simple: If you don't add value, at best, you're offering customers what they already have.

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Strategy is the story of a company written about its future.

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Subscribe to my free Strategic Seeing newsletter and follow me on Substack to read such notes daily.

A few more things:

Your New Year’s gift: a new free checklist. Check how you set your strategic goals. Find the checklist here, along with two others.

My biggest 2024 accomplishment was publishing my book, Red and Yellow Strategies: Flip Your Strategic Thinking and Overcome Short-termism.

I wish you all the best in 2025. May this year be even better than 2024 for you!

In 2025, I’ll continue to write my newsletters:

Strategic Seeing

Strategy in Three Minutes

Life Strategy

See you in 2025!

Sincerely yours, Svyatoslav Biryulin