Hot Seat

Chapter 25. Repeat Your Strategy

Many aspects of company strategy are difficult and complicated, but this one isn’t.

Repeat your strategy constantly.

You think about your company strategy all the time, and in your mind it’s as clear as day. You tell new employees about it, you think about it when you’re making decisions; it’s a part of the day-to-day execution of your job.

Not so for everyone else—and it’s amazing how fast a CEO’s perception of these things can move out of alignment with everyone else’s.

One important way to repeat your strategy is to bake it into your board book—the slides and documents you share with your board of directors before each board meeting. At Ontela, for our inaugural board meeting, the first slide was our business model. It looked like this:

We had a great conversation about it, as I recall. At the second meeting, they weren’t that surprised as I read it again, slowly.

But they were a little perplexed that I never stopped doing this, despite some bewildered looks and snickering a few months in.

Fast-forward three years, and one of our board members had the following feedback:

Dan, I thought you were a little bit crazy to start every board meeting by slowly reading the business model back to us, every time. But some of the best conversations we’ve had have come from that slide. Every few months, we notice something that we’re doing that doesn’t fit, ...