What does “strategy” mean?
What does “strategy” even mean? What’s your definition? Do you see it as just a “synonym for expensive,” as one economist called it?
decision
62 posts
You’ve already lost that money
You’ve probably tried a lot of things to market your business over the years. And you may have noticed that the tough part isn’t coming up with new ideas to try out. The tough part is stopping the stuff that isn’t working.
What we can and cannot do
People reportedly spend about an hour every week just deciding what to watch on Netflix. And more than two hours every week deciding what to eat. And that was before the pandemic.
Is there a person in your marketing?
Abraham Lincoln told the story of an “automaton chess player,” a complex machine that, all the way back in the early 1800s, could beat human players at the game.
The important thing is to aim
An old friend of John D. Rockefeller once recalled that—despite being one of the wealthiest people to ever live—Rockefeller would insist that they switch to old golf balls when playing around water hazards.
Wishes feel good and rarely come true
Entrepreneurs are full of ideas. It’s what inspired us to start our business, create our products or services, and sell them to the world in the first place. But, over time, we can start to think that the valuable part is the idea, and not the action that follows.
Anything is better than indecision
“With a ton of charts and a wondrous plan, he comes, behold, the Research Man. Give him four and twenty scholars, give him twenty thousand dollars, and in two months he’ll bring to view, the facts that you already knew.”
The most important question in strategy
Building a sustainably profitable business is a bit easier, and a lot more likely, when you couple that drive with a strong strategy.
Every decision is a marketing decision
My favorite cognitive bias is called “déformation professionelle.” Basically, we see the world through our jobs. It’s a bias I certainly have. I see everything through a marketing strategy lens. Often, that just makes me a boring conversation partner. But, sometimes, it actually helps.
Everything is a tradeoff
Every great decision you make comes with downsides. There is never a perfect answer.
There’s no such thing as a riskless strategy
If you want things to change, you have to try to change things, and that entails assuming the risk that things might not go the way you want. Every plan is a guess about the future, and sometimes our guesses are wrong.
You’ve already hit the iceberg
A common mistake when things go wrong is to spend time thinking about how they could have gone. Or how we’d hoped things would turn out.
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