Why Strategy Alone Doesn’t Settle Decisions
How can you ensure everyone on the team is deciding the same way.
Two smart people. Same strategy. Opposite decisions.
This week’s issue gets into what helps teams choose the same way when trade-offs appear: guiding principles, transparent leadership, distributed judgment, and the subtle ways language shapes how we think and decide.
Cheers,
Kevin
FEATURED MUSING
When smart people keep reaching different answers to the same decision, the strategy isn’t specific enough to run the business.
I’ve seen this pattern over and over. Leadership agrees on the strategy. The big priorities are clear. The direction makes sense.
Then a tough choice lands with a team and alignment breaks.
There are two good options with real trade-offs. Each side can point to the strategy and justify their call. The debate goes on because the strategy describes intent, not choice.
High-level strategy needs to stay high-level. That’s what makes it understandable and sustainable. It tells people where the company is headed and what matters most.
But it doesn’t help settle day-to-day judgment calls.
People fill the gap with their own read of the strategy. Their function. Their metric. Their incentives. Their experience. All reasonable. All different.
That’s where guiding principles play a critical role.
Guiding principles put decision rules in writing. They add precision where broad priorities leave room for interpretation. They give teams a shared way to choose.
Big statements often sound clear to the authors:
Grow profitably.
Be customer focused.
Move faster.
Each one can drive very different decisions depending on who is under pressure and what number they own.
Decision rules make the intent operational:
Protect long-term customer trust over short-term margin.
Win in one core segment before expanding.
Decline work that breaks the operating model.
Now similar decisions get handled in similar ways across teams. Fewer escalations, less re-litigation, and more consistency.
Big strategy tells you the destination. Guiding principles tell you how to steer.
LEADERSHIP
Distributed Judgment Beats Central Control
I came across this excellent article by Chris Gardner that draws on his conversations with 45 UK startup founders. He found a clear pattern that early-stage leaders are moving away from authority as the main leadership currency and toward a style that is more transparent, coaching-led, and peer-informed. That is a style that bodes well for execution, and it fits well with the role guiding principles discussed in this week’s Featured Musing. He lays out several practical ways leaders can build a more effective culture. When you make your thinking, priorities, and trade-offs visible, teams can use shared decision rules to make solid calls on their own. The result is fewer bottlenecks and more consistent judgment across the business.
CAREER DEVELOPMENT
The New Edge Is Still Human
MC is one of my favorite follows on Substack because he writes incredibly well and thinks even better. In this note, he argues that as AI takes on more technical and analytical tasks, the real career advantage shifts toward human skills like judgment, communication, taste, and how well you work with other people. The people who stand out will be the ones who can frame problems well, build trust, and help groups reach good decisions. As tools keep improving, the ability to work well with humans keeps compounding.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Principles are ways of successfully dealing with reality to get what you want out of life.”
— Ray Dalio, Principles (2017)
INTERESTING
The Weirdness of Words
This TikTok video on the weirdness of everyday language is super fascinating and really made me think about how much language impacts how we think — and how our thinking shapes the language we use. He walks through the odd logic hiding inside common phrases, and once you hear it, you start noticing it everywhere. Words shape interpretation and meaning far more than they get credit for.
😀 AND NOW… YOUR MOMENT OF HAPPINESS. 😀
My book, The Strategy Trap: Why Companies Fail at Execution and How to Get It Right, comes is now available!
If you’ve ever struggled to turn team agreement into consistent action, the book goes deep on how to fix that — with practical tools, real-world stories, and a framework for turning strategy into results.
If you know someone who wrestles with the gap between plan and execution, please forward this along.
Good point!
Call them “guiding principles”, “policies” (Rumelt) or “capabilities and management systems” (Martin), the point is you need to deconstruct it into its component pieces to make it operational, at each step surfacing the inevitable tradeoffs and clarifying how to manage them.
Martin calls it “strategic choice chartering” and wrote a number of pieces on it of interested in digging deeper into the hows.
Thanks for calling out the article I wrote last week.