HBR's 10 Must Reads 2023

Eliminate Strategic Overload

by Felix Oberholzer-Gee

IN THE PAST FEW DECADES, strategy has become increasingly sophisticated and complicated. If you work for a sizable organization, chances are your company has a marketing strategy (to track and shape consumer tastes), a corporate strategy (to benefit from synergies), a global strategy (to capture worldwide business opportunities), an innovation strategy (to pull ahead of the competition), a digital strategy (to exploit the internet), and a social strategy (to interact with communities online). In each of those domains, talented people work on a long list of urgent initiatives.

Companies are right, of course, to consider all these challenges. Rapid technological change, global competition, ...