HBR Guide to Setting Your Strategy

CHAPTER 24

Strategy Is All About Practice

by Roger L. Martin

I have never seen anybody become good at strategy without practice. It may happen, but I have never seen it. I doubt that I will see it, because strategy is a discipline. Like any discipline, you have to believe in it and work at it to become skilled; both mindset and effort are required to make progress and become adept at strategy.

The key to the strategy mindset is to view business life as not entirely random; stochastic but not random. While it may be necessary to revisit and revise choices more often than convenient, the assumption holds that effortful, determined, revisable strategy is better than simply letting happen whatever will happen.

By far the easiest thing to do is to ...