Business strategy. A plan or an advantage? Which one do you have?

EXECUTIVE RESET

Stop #13

The Truman Show, Groundhog Day and Moneyball. Three stories about illusions, worn-out patterns and an advantage others fail to see.

A DARK CINEMA. BEFORE THE ADS.

Congratulations! Your strategy is ready. It looks really great.

You know exactly what the textbook homework involves, so everything was done step by step, the way it should be. You can tick it all off: market analysed, competitors properly identified, segments deliberately chosen. An ambitious 2030 vision, a speech ready to engage your people. Goals translated into results, an action plan, investments and initiatives broken down by quarter. My favourite SWOT is there too. KPIs assigned, and you are perfectly aware of the risks. Everything laid out, slide after slide, table after table.

It all adds up.

That's a huge piece of work. Hours of analysis, meetings, discussions, different perspectives clashing. Often weeks of work by a whole team. I have no intention of downplaying it, quite the opposite. I appreciate it, because I know how much work it takes.

Still, let me ask you my first question.

Who actually wrote this strategy?

You? Your team? External advisors? Or all of you together?

But I'm not asking for names. What interests me more is who decided, and on what basis, what is true about your business. Which data was considered most important, whose opinions were heard, which assumptions were challenged, and which were accepted without much discussion?

Why do I ask?

Because there is a huge difference between a strategy built on what is really happening in the market and inside the organisation, and a strategy that perfectly justifies what the board had already decided. What it wanted to prove with this strategy from the very beginning.

And here is my first, perhaps uncomfortable, reflection for you.

During all those weeks of work, did you discover anything that genuinely changed the way you think about your business? Or did you mainly find better and better arguments for sticking with what you believed from the start?

I'm not saying that good analysis has to change an earlier decision. But it should at least honestly check whether that decision holds up.

Because a well-written strategy is not necessarily a well-thought-out strategy.

And yet both can look identical on slides.

SPECIAL EFFECTS

All right. Now for some special effects. We are at the cinema, after all. 😉

Enter AI.

Today you no longer need three weeks of work to prepare a similar-looking document. The right prompt, some data, a few iterations, and moments later you have something that resembles the output of a pretty good strategy team. It sounds not only tempting but often very credible and complete, doesn't it?

Got it. Done!

You already know I'm going to ask. Just one question for now… though I have more.

Did AI do the same work your team has just done?

Not necessarily. Because preparing a document is not the whole process of creating a strategy. But AI can produce material that, at first glance, makes a very similar impression. And that in itself is interesting.

Now imagine that, at the same time, five of your competitors did exactly the same thing. They used similar sources, analysed the same market and asked an algorithm to find the best direction for growth.

Five companies. Five professional strategies.

Each one logical. Each one convincing. But what if each one is surprisingly similar to the others?

If everyone has access to similar analyses and recommendations, where exactly does your advantage come from?

Exactly.

No, don't think I'm about to declare humans the winners over AI. Or the other way round.

I'll go further.

Because perhaps it isn't about who prepares the better answer. It's about who first notices something the others don't see yet. Who, instead of confirming the obvious, dares to question it. Who understands what the game is really about.

That's why I have one more question. A far more uncomfortable one.

How do you know that the problem you are solving right now is really your most important problem?

So today we won't settle who writes better strategies. We'll look for something far more interesting.

Do you really understand the rules of the game your company is playing?

Do you have your own idea for creating an advantage?

Do your decisions really lead in the chosen direction?

And finally...

Can you actually play this strategy once the presentation ends and the real business begins?

READY? THE MOVIE MARATHON BEGINS.

Three films. Seemingly completely different.

The first is about a man who doesn't know he is living in someone else's script. The second is about a guy whose every day starts the same way, no matter what he tried the day before. The third is about baseball, which, I warn you, you don't have to like at all.

The Truman Show. Groundhog Day. Moneyball.

We won't be judging the acting. Let's look at these stories a little differently.

The lights go down.

Here we go.

ACT I. THE TRUMAN SHOW

What if your company lives in a world that doesn't exist?

Do you remember The Truman Show?

Jim Carrey plays Truman Burbank. A likeable man. He has a wife, a job, friends, a house in a beautiful little town. The neighbours smile. Life flows calmly and predictably. Everything looks almost perfect.

Until it doesn't.

One day, a stage light falls from the sky.

Strange, isn't it? Stage lights don't fall from the sky.

Then more signals appear. Something doesn't fit. People behave unnaturally. Coincidences start to look suspicious. Truman tries to understand what is going on.

And we, the audience, know more.

We know he lives in a huge television studio. That he is surrounded by actors. That his whole life is part of a show whose script is written by someone else.

The most interesting thing, though, is that this world worked for many years.

Truman had responsibilities, made decisions, planned for the future. Within the reality he knew, his actions made sense. Except that what he believed to be reality was a carefully staged world. Following someone else's vision. On someone else's terms.

And now imagine that we are not on a film set, but in a boardroom.

What if, while writing your strategy, you all came to believe the same (your own) story?

In companies, people rarely build a fictional world on purpose. You don't need a director, cameras or a giant dome over the town. Sometimes a few beliefs are enough, repeated so often over the years that we start treating them as facts.

• “Our customers choose us for our quality.”

• “We are the leader in our category.”

• “We have a great product. We just need stronger marketing.”

• “Sales aren't delivering because the market is tough.”

Sound familiar?

It does to me. And I have no problem with these statements, as long as we can back them up.

The problem starts when we stop checking not only whether they are still true, but also what they actually tell us about our business.

Because even a true statement doesn't necessarily explain the cause of a problem. And not every accurate observation is a sufficient basis for a strategic decision.

Look.

• What if a customer stays with you not because they love your product, but because switching suppliers would be too difficult?

• What if your brand is highly recognisable, but customers still don't understand what exactly they would be paying more for?

• What if the product you have considered your greatest advantage for years still sells well, but its profitability is shrinking, and the market's future growth is starting to happen somewhere else entirely?

Notice how much changes in the way you think about your company when, instead of confirming the familiar story, you start checking what is really behind it.

Because perhaps your company doesn't have a problem with executing its strategy.

Perhaps it is very efficiently executing a strategy based on a reality that no longer exists.

Imagine a company that wants to increase sales.

The board notices that growth is slowing and makes a decision: we need more leads. Marketing gets a budget. Campaigns, landing pages and new prospecting activities are launched. The number of leads grows. And sales still don't.

What do we do?

Increase the budget? Change the agency? Add more campaigns?

Or should we have checked earlier why the customers who already come to us don't buy? Maybe the offer doesn't address their real needs. Maybe we are trying to sell the wrong solution to the wrong group. Or maybe the buying process ends with a question nobody can answer?

Look at what happened.

The team carried out the task efficiently. The number of leads went up. KPIs delivered.

Only the business problem remained.

And not because marketing did a bad job. Perhaps it did exactly what it was asked to do, and did it perfectly. But did anyone make sure beforehand that we were asking it to solve the right problem?

You can have all the right answers. Just to the wrong questions.

That's why what happens before choosing a strategic direction matters so much. Not just gathering data, but understanding what it means. Telling symptoms from causes. Identifying the real challenge, not the one that is easiest to name.

And sometimes also listening to someone who sees what can't be seen from the top of the organisation.

Do you remember the ending of The Truman Show?

Truman sails to the point where his boat hits the wall of an artificial horizon.

All his life he had been looking at that horizon.

Only now does he discover that it is a backdrop.

And where does the reality of your business end and the picture begin that you have grown so used to over the years that you stopped questioning it?

Stay with that question for a moment.

Because the next film shows what happens when, even after seeing the problem, we keep trying to solve it the old way.

ACT II. GROUNDHOG DAY

A new strategy. The same Monday.

Bill Murray. Groundhog Day.

Phil Connors is a TV weatherman. A bit cynical, a bit arrogant, convinced he knows exactly how the world works. And suddenly he falls into a peculiar trap. Every morning he wakes up on the same day. The same time. The same song. The same people. The same situations. At first he experiments. Then he schemes, rebels, tries to outsmart everyone around him.

Except the next morning...

6:00 a.m. again.

The same song again.

The same day again.

And this always brings to mind a scene from business life.

Monday. 9:00 a.m. Sales meeting.

→ “We need to improve the pipeline.”

Monday, three months later.

→ “We need to improve the pipeline.”

New quarter. New KPIs. New dashboard.

→ “We need to improve the pipeline.”

You might smile.

But for the people who are genuinely trying to deliver all of this, it isn't always funny.

How can you change so much and still keep doing the same thing?

Let's take an example.

For years, a company has had a problem with the quality of its sales opportunities. Forecasts include large contracts that don't move to the next stage for months. So the board invests in a new CRM. Training. Data migration. New dashboards. Automation. Everything implemented. And a few months later, the forecasts are still unreliable. Why?

Because nobody changed the way customers are qualified. Salespeople still enter opportunities into the pipeline that have no real buying decision behind them. Managers still ask mainly about the size of the funnel, not about what has actually happened on the customer's side.

A new system.

The old logic.

And Monday again.

I'm not saying that investing in a CRM was a mistake. Maybe it was needed. But a tool alone could not solve a problem whose source lay in the way the organisation operates.

That's not a change of strategy. It's modernising the way we make the same mistakes.

Let's look further.

“But strategy requires consistency.”

You can't change direction with every trend. You can't reinvent the company from scratch every quarter.

Agreed.

But what if reality has changed?

Customers start buying differently. Competitors find a new way of delivering value. Technology changes the economics of the entire category.

And us?

We follow the roadmap we set, we repeat the patterns. After all, we approved it in December.

How do you stay true to your direction without becoming a hostage to your own plan?

This is one of the harder questions in strategy today. I won't hand you a solution, but it's certainly not about constantly preparing new presentations. So what should we do? It's that simple and that demanding: observe reality and know which assumptions still hold and which need rethinking.

That's how I understand the point of an always-on strategy: strategy can't be just an annual event. It has to remain a living point of reference for decisions.

But what matters most to me here is not market-monitoring technology.

People.

Because someone has to bring uncomfortable data to the meeting. Someone has to say that an earlier decision no longer makes sense. And someone else has to be able to listen.

Without immediately looking for someone to blame.

Without defending our own idea just because it's ours.

Strategic maturity doesn't mean never changing your mind. It means knowing when and why you should.

And when does Phil finally start living differently?

Not when he finds yet another clever way to outsmart the same day. He changes when he begins to understand himself, other people and the consequences of his actions differently.

The same day.

But a completely different person.

It's often similar in companies.

It's not enough to change what we do if we don't change what we base our decisions on.

But even that isn't enough to create a strategy.

You may already understand your market. You may have an organisation that knows how to learn. You may manage operations brilliantly. And still not have an answer to the most important question.

Why would a customer choose you?

Exactly.

Time for baseball.

ACT III. MONEYBALL

And who said you have to play the same way as everyone else?

A warning. You don't need to know the rules of baseball. I don't, and I'm not going to explain them today. 😉

It's 2002. The Oakland Athletics. American baseball. Billy Beane, the general manager responsible for building the team, has a problem… several problems, in fact.

The richest clubs have budgets Oakland can't compete with. Top players leave for wherever they are paid more. And Billy is still expected to deliver results.

The goal is obvious.

To win.

Except everyone wants to win, and not everyone has the same means.

You can complain about the lack of money. You can try to get a bigger budget. You can look for the next star nobody has discovered yet.

You can also try to do the same as your richer competitors. Only cheaper. Smarter. More efficiently.

But Billy starts to notice something others underestimate.

He can't change the rules of baseball. But he can question the way everyone tries to win by those rules.

Because are the best players really always the ones clubs pay the most for?

Oakland uses statistical analysis to value players differently. Not only through names, reputation or flashy play, but through the skills that actually help score runs. Such as the ability to get on base, which matters for the result but at the time was not always properly valued by the market.

And suddenly it turns out that a player who doesn't look like a star can be extremely valuable to the team. And since others undervalue his skills, perhaps he can be signed for much less money.

The limited budget doesn't disappear.

It becomes a reason to look for another way.

Billy no longer tries to buy cheaper versions of the players everyone wants. He starts to redefine what value his team really needs in order to win.

The goal stayed the same.

So did the rules of baseball.

What changed was the way of building chances to win.

And this is where the most interesting lesson in strategy begins.

Everyone wants to win. But not everyone has an idea of how.

Let's move to business. Let's look at the statements in our strategy:

→ “We want to increase sales by 30%. We are expanding distribution.”

Great. That's a goal.

→ “We will be the innovation leader.”

Sounds ambitious. That's an aspiration.

→ “We will enter three new markets.”

That's a direction of growth.

→ “We will launch a campaign, hire salespeople and implement a CRM.”

Those are actions.

They may all be needed.

But none of these statements yet explains why we have a chance to win.

Billy could also have prepared an excellent recruitment plan. Set out budgets, scouting activities, transfer deadlines. Except that buying players more efficiently according to the existing criteria didn't solve his problem. He had to question the criteria themselves.

It's similar in business.

Strategy requires choosing where to compete, which customers we want to create value for, and how we will gain an advantage. And then building the capabilities that make it possible to actually deliver that advantage.

Because deciding that we will be different is not enough.

You also have to build a company that can deliver that difference.

Imagine a board announcing a new premium strategy. A beautiful presentation. A great narrative. From now on, we are building a stronger position, exceptional quality and a personalised customer experience.

Except salespeople are still rewarded mainly for volume, so at the end of the month they rescue the numbers with discounts. Purchasing is supposed to cut costs, even if it affects the product standard. Customer service shortens calls, even though we promised customers special care.

And marketing? Marketing still communicates exceptional value.

So? Do you feel the disconnect?

Each department pursues its own goals. Some even with great success.

Except those successes start getting in each other's way.

Because how can you build a premium position if the decisions made in the company systematically undermine the promise the customer is supposed to pay more for?

That's exactly why Michael Porter places such strong emphasis on the fit between the activities that create an advantage.

It's not about every department being the best at everything. It's about choosing and combining activities so that the offer, the pricing model, the processes, the capabilities and people's decisions reinforce one another.

Advantage doesn't come from a sum of best practices. It comes from activities that are chosen and combined in the right way.

And that's exactly what Billy Beane had to do with his team. Finding undervalued players wasn't enough. He also had to turn them into a team that knows how to win.

Let's look at one more difficult aspect.

The toughest opponent? Sometimes your own habits.

In Moneyball, not everyone is thrilled with the new approach. Experienced scouts defend traditional methods. The manager has his own vision of how to run the team. Conflicts, tension and resistance appear. Hardly surprising.

For years, people built their experience and professional authority. They made decisions according to certain rules. Now someone is questioning the way they have always recognised talent. And it is no longer only about statistics.

It's about a change that affects people, their beliefs and the way they work.

Does this sound familiar from business?

• Sales doesn't want to give up a customer who brings in revenue, even though they consume a disproportionate amount of resources.

• The product team defends a feature it has been working on for a year.

• The board doesn't want to end a project it has already invested several million in.

Everyone has arguments and, what's more, some of them are really good. Because that customer really does pay. That feature really does work. And the project really did take a huge amount of work. But the strategic question is a different one:

Does continuing to invest in these activities bring us closer to the advantage we decided to build?

And this is where the hardest part of the game begins.

Because strategy requires not only spotting a new opportunity, but also directing money, capabilities, attention and the energy of the whole organisation towards it. And these resources are not unlimited. So every choice has consequences. For budgets. For projects. For people. Sometimes also for the leader, who has to question their own earlier decisions.

But be careful.

Strategy is not the art of giving things up for the sake of giving them up.

It's not about doing less just because “less is more” looks good on a slide, but about knowing what is really worth investing in and which activities together will create value the customer will be willing to pay for.

Giving things up is the price of a choice. Not its purpose.

Billy Beane had to pay that price.

By not funding everything that would have been desirable. By not choosing players according to other people's expectations. By risking his reputation and making decisions whose soundness he could not yet prove with results. He had no guarantee. But he had his own well-founded answer to the question of how to build a team capable of winning under conditions he could not change.

Except that once you step onto the field, even the best strategy doesn't guarantee victory.

And the finale of this story shows it perfectly.

THE FINALE. 20 WINS. WITHOUT THE BIGGEST TROPHY.

So did the strategy work or not?

The Oakland Athletics win 20 games in a row. They set what was then the American League record. They finish the regular season with a huge number of wins, a great success given the club's financial means.

Except... they don't win the championship. (No, there's no super American happy ending here.) They are knocked out on the way to the finals.

So what now?

Did Billy fail?

Was his strategy wrong?

Should we go back to the traditional way of building a team, since despite all the changes they didn't win the biggest trophy?

It's a tempting conclusion.

We like it in business, too.

Good result = good strategy

Bad result = bad strategy

Simple. Clear. Easy to present at a board meeting.

But this is where I put a double question mark: “??”

You can have a good strategy and lose.

Just as you can have a weak strategy and succeed for a while.

A favourable economy, an exceptionally large customer, weak competitors or simple coincidence can improve the result. And even a well-founded decision doesn't guarantee that everything we expected will happen.

Does that mean the result doesn't matter?

Of course it does.

But a result is information that needs to be understood, not an automatic verdict on the quality of a strategy.

And here I'd like us to pause the film for a moment.

Because what fascinates me most in Billy's story is not the winning streak itself, but the fact that a man without the biggest resources stopped treating the established, well-worn way of competing as the only possible one.

He saw the problem differently.

He found value where others underestimated it.

He made decisions that had consequences and organised action around them.

That doesn't mean he found a way to win every game.

But he found a different way of building chances to win.

And perhaps that's why this story says more about strategy than many a well-prepared document.

But it doesn't give you a solution, it gives you questions. Then again, perhaps questions are exactly where we should start, and we should keep making sure they keep coming up?

ALMOST OVER. THE LIGHTS IN THE CINEMA ARE COMING ON.

Remember where we started?

Truman lived in a world whose rules he had no reason to question.

Phil Connors woke up every day in the same reality until he began to understand himself and his own actions differently.

Billy Beane found a way to compete that his stronger rivals underestimated.

Three different stories.

Three different kinds of courage.

To see reality as it is, not as it is comfortable for us to believe.

To recognise when consistency turns into repeating mistakes.

And to choose your own way of competing instead of endlessly perfecting the art of imitating others.

That's why I'm not convinced by strategy understood only as a presentation the board approves once a year.

Strategy is not what a company has decided to achieve. It is a well-founded choice of how it intends to create value, gain an advantage and organise its resources so that this choice has a chance of delivering results.

It doesn't give guarantees, but it gives meaning to choices. It explains why we play right here, in exactly this way, and it helps decide what to do when the situation on the field changes.

The real test only begins when the presentation ends anyway.

Billy Beane didn't figure out how to play better by the same, widely accepted methods. He began to understand differently how it is possible to win without changing the rules of the game.

And you?

If I took your strategy presentation away tomorrow, would I still be able to recognise your strategy from the decisions you make?

SEE BEYOND. LEAD.

Before you speed up - pause wisely.

🎬 End credits. But not the end of the conversation.

Do you like my stories that challenge the obvious and leave you with a question that stays with you?

Film inspirations: The Truman Show (1998, dir. Peter Weir), Groundhog Day (1993, dir. Harold Ramis), Moneyball (2011, dir. Bennett Miller).