From the man himself!
Key TakeawaysBest BitsPart One1) Get Myself Psyched Upa) Project Forward the Current Pathb) Remind Myself of the Inherent Goodness and Fairness of Most People2) Focus on the Problem to be Solveda) Focus Like a Laser on the Problem to be Solvedb) Specify the Form of the Desired Outcomec) Remind Myself What I Don’t ControlPractitioner InsightsPart Two3) Imagine Possibility Portraitsa) Remind Myself of the Nature of Activityb) Target Form of Outputc) Deploy the Search Vectors4) Make, Enforce, and Adjust Choicesa) Makeb) Enforcec) AdjustPractitioner Insights
Key Takeaways
Here are the key takeaways by section from “How I Do Strategy” by Roger Martin :
- Get Myself Psyched Up
- Adopt a transformational mindset: Enter strategy work aiming to create a meaningfully better future, not just incremental improvements. The energy and ambition you bring shape the possibilities you’ll see and pursue.
- Preparation is mental: The most valuable prep is imaginative—envision futures, possibilities, and coordinated choices—rather than just compiling analyses or data decks.
- Extrapolate today’s choices: Soberly forecast where the status quo leads over 5–10 years; this clarifies why “amelioration” (mitigating pains) won’t solve structural problems.
- Make the gap undeniable: When you see the likely destination of inaction, it becomes easier to commit to bolder choices that actually change the trajectory.
- Assume reciprocity when you create value: If your strategy produces clear value and you treat stakeholders fairly, most customers, employees, partners, and investors will respond in kind.
- Weak strategy biases perceptions: When your offer isn’t compelling, others may seem “mean” or unfair; fix the value creation and fairness first rather than blaming stakeholders.
1a) Project Forward the Current Path
1b) Remind Myself of the Inherent Goodness and Fairness of Most People
- Focus on the Problem to be Solved
- Strategy is problem-solving: The core purpose of strategy is to make a specific problem disappear—not to produce a document or a bundle of initiatives.
- Define the problem in its competitive context: Understand how past choices created your current constraints and competitive dynamics, then articulate the precise problem to be removed.
- Eliminate vagueness: Convert fuzzy aspirations into a crisp, singular problem statement that guides choices and trade-offs.
- Resist solutioneering: Don’t jump to initiatives until the problem is unmistakably clear; clarity prevents scattered or cosmetic actions.
- Define the “box” for winning: Identify the shape of success (e.g., distinctiveness that pulls clients in, indispensability to customers, leadership in a field, national standing) to filter options that can’t deliver that form.
- Use form to guide choices: By setting the desired outcome’s form early, you align subsequent where-to-play and how-to-win decisions to produce that exact kind of result.
- Control levers vs. influence: You do not control customers, employees, suppliers, partners, regulators, or markets; you influence them through the coordinated choices you do control.
- Orchestrate the controllables: Focus on the limited, high-leverage choices (offer, positioning, experiences, capabilities, incentives) that can reliably elicit the stakeholder behaviors you seek.
2a) Focus Like a Laser on the Problem to be Solved
2b) Specify the Form of the Desired Outcome
2c) Remind Myself What I Don’t Control
- Imagine Possibility Portraits
- Core idea: Strategy creation is a heuristic practice, not an algorithm. There’s no single right answer; the goal is to use practiced heuristics to craft an integrated set of choices that compels customer behavior.
- Prerequisites: Come in with a tightly defined problem (from Step Two) and clarity that the task is to integrate choices that influence what you don’t control (customers).
- Strategy is a heuristic, not a formula. Heuristics guide you toward goals but don’t guarantee success.
- Skill comes from practice. Great strategists are highly practiced strategists.
- Mindset: Don’t hunt for “the” answer; apply your practiced heuristic to produce the best strategy you can now.
- Output as portrait, not list. Visualize an integrated “picture” of choices and how they fit together to compel customers.
- Can’t/Won’t test. Your set of choices should be hard for competitors to copy (can’t) or unattractive for them to copy (won’t).
- Summary: Strategy = heuristic search for an integrated choice set that solves a tight problem and can be visualized as a compelling portrait (not disjointed initiatives).
- Three creative search vectors:
- Analogy: Borrow patterns from other domains to unlock solutions. Example: defining “social entrepreneurship” at Skoll to build a field, akin to how other organizations defined their categories.
- Tradeoff: When facing either/or, use Integrative Thinking to design a choice that overcomes the tradeoff. Examples: Rotman bridged research vs. teaching by having professors teach their research; Tennis Canada controlled outputs (standards) while allowing input flexibility (coaches).
- Anomaly: Notice outliers to reveal hidden truths. Example: Great firms avoided strategy consultants because they wanted to learn strategy themselves; Monitor taught clients strategy, creating distinctiveness.
- Practice improves output quality across all three vectors.
3a) Remind Myself of the Nature of Activity
3b) Target Form of Output
3c) Deploy the Search Vectors
- Make, Enforce, and Adjust Choices
- You need to decide, then defend, then adapt — in that order and with intent.
- Be bold. Choose the most compelling possibility portrait.
- Non-choice is a choice. Avoiding a decision is itself your strategy — usually a weak one.
- Strategy fails without enforcement. If you won’t enforce, step aside for someone who will.
- Common drift: Organizations, especially non-profits, broaden into random activities that dilute energy.
- Examples: At Skoll and Tennis Canada, strategy enforcement was a standing board-meeting job; at Rotman, enforcement included role-modeling and controlling key levers; at Monitor, resisting industry-practice structures preserved distinctiveness until abandonment post-departure.
- Reality check: You can’t enforce once you’re gone; success can fund dilution by successors.
- Enforce but don’t ossify. Adjust purposefully when the environment shifts; avoid aimless drift.
- Examples: Rotman revised content pillars (dropping “Value of One,” adding business design and later CDL/entrepreneurship) to maintain distinctiveness; Monitor evolved to a more extreme “Strategic Choice Structuring Process” to avoid doing too much for clients and to deepen distinctiveness.
4a) Make
4b) Enforce
4c) Adjust
Practitioner Insights (relevant to these sections)
- Strategy as practiced craft: 44 years of practice plus expert critique prevents bad-habit lock-in.
- Set-up matters: Steps 1 and 2 are prerequisites; mediocre possibilities can’t be rescued by strong choosing or enforcement.
- Guard the strategy: Expect attempts to water it down; enforce with discipline, but adjust with principle when warranted.
Citations:
Best Bits
Part One
1) Get Myself Psyched Up
a) Project Forward the Current Path
I start by taking a cold, hard look at likely future progress along the road on which we are currently traveling. That is, if we keep doing what we are doing, where will we most likely be in five-ten years.
Projecting forward helps me to recognize that it is not worth it to pursue a strategy to ameliorate a bad situation. That would likely reduce misery but not eliminate it.
b) Remind Myself of the Inherent Goodness and Fairness of Most People
When your strategy is weak, the actors in your world aren’t particularly generous with you. If your offering is mediocre, customers won’t be loyal, competitors will attack you, and investors will shy away from you and/or badger you. But that is not meanness, it is fairness. However, if you have a weak strategy for a long period, you will come to believe that actors around you are mean and unfair.
2) Focus on the Problem to be Solved
a) Focus Like a Laser on the Problem to be Solved
Strategy is not a thing that you need because you learned at business school that you are supposed to have one or your board says it needs to approve one. Rather, strategy is a problem-solving technique. When you are facing a problem, strategy is the tool you use to make that problem disappear.
Thus, to apply it usefully, you need to have a problem that you want to solve. Problems are a result of your historical choices interacting with the competitive environment. The only way the problem will go away is if you make a different set of choices. But to be useful, that different set of choices needs to respond to a precisely defined problem.
So, I spend a lot of time on defining the problem.
b) Specify the Form of the Desired Outcome
Equally, I spend time on specifying the form of the desired solution to the well-defined problem. If you don’t have an objective function, any strategy alternative would appear plausible.
Hello Lewis Carrol…
If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. — Lewis Carroll
Note that at this point in my thinking, there isn’t yet a strategy to make any of those outcomes possible, nor even a specific Winning Aspiration. Rather, I specify the box in which the Winning Aspiration will need to fit. That will help me avoid wasting time on possibilities that are not likely to end up with an outcome in that box.
c) Remind Myself What I Don’t Control
Before I dive in, I remind myself what I do and don’t control. First and foremost, in the don’t control category, is customers. My job is to make an integrated set of choices that influences them to take desired action. I can’t delude myself into believing that I can make them do anything. The same holds for employees. This isn’t the era of indentured servitude. They will work for whomever they choose. And the same holds for suppliers, distribution channels, partners, and governments.
I control and can pull a limited number of levers — so I need to pull them in a coordinated and compelling way. That is my job.
Practitioner Insights
As I have progressed in my career, I have become ever more convinced that the preparation for strategy choice is as important as the choice itself.
The preparation is almost entirely between my ears. Lots of it is imagination — imagining how the future will unfold under a status quo set of choices, imagining how customers and employees will react under better circumstances than today, imagining problems overcome, and imagining that I can compel other actors to choose to play the part I would like them to play.
Part Two
3) Imagine Possibility Portraits
a) Remind Myself of the Nature of Activity
…there is no one right answer in any strategy situation…
My strategy heuristic includes having a carefully and thoroughly defined problem (Step Two from last week) and a clear task — an integrated set of choices that compels the most important thing that I don’t control, which is customer behavior.
b) Target Form of Output
To summarize to this point, strategy is a heuristic search for an integrated set of choices that solves a tightly defined problem, and that set of choices can be visualized as a portrait, not just as a list of initiatives.
c) Deploy the Search Vectors
As I discussed in a recent PTW/PI, when I develop creative strategy possibilities, I search along three vectors: analogy, tradeoff, and anomaly.
Analogy … to build a new field, the organization needed to create a clear definition of it to help people rally around that new field and support it.
With respect to tradeoff, when the problem can be expressed as an either/or tradeoff — i.e. we could do A, but it would prevent us from reaping the benefits of B and vice versa — I use Integrative Thinking to search for creative strategy possibilities that arise from attacking rather than accepting the tradeoff.
I pay attention to anomalies that may reveal something currently hidden from the mainstream.
My experience is that if you search along each of these vectors, you will come up with a solution — and with increasing practice, you will generate ever better ones.
4) Make, Enforce, and Adjust Choices
a) Make
You must be bold and to choose which strategy possibility portrait is most compelling to you. And remember, if you think you can avoid the risk of making a choice by not explicitly making one, not choosing is a choice — and it is your strategy choice.
b) Enforce
Once you make your integrated set of choices, it is essential to vigorously enforce it. This week I talked to a new client whose strategy failed because no one enforced it — every business did whatever it wanted to. If you aren’t willing to enforce your strategy, then get out of the way and give someone else that job.
… The natural desire of successful organizations, especially non-profits, is to broaden, which dissipates energy because there typically is no strategy behind the additional random things they want to do. …
c) Adjust
Enforcement should only go so far. It is a bad idea to enforce a strategy that longer matches the competitive environment. You need to be open to adjusting — but only purposefully, not in an aimless drift.
Practitioner Insights
Strategy is a heuristic. That means that practice is absolutely critical. I am good at strategy because I have been practicing it for 44 years. But the second part is critique by experts. That is the only thing that ensures continuous learning rather than ensconcing bad habits.