I Run a Strategy Firm. I Don't Have a Strategy.

A confession from someone who sells the one thing he can't seem to keep in stock.

I have spent most of my career selling strategy to other people. So it is a little awkward to admit that I don't have one of my own.

This is the kind of thing you confess to your accountant, not in print. I'm saying it out loud anyway, partly because it's true, and partly because I've started to suspect that a lot of serious people, the ones with big offices and impressive titles, are in exactly the same spot. They are just better dressed about it.

Let me be fair to myself, since no one else is going to do it. I know exactly who we serve, what we are worth, and why we are not interchangeable with anyone else who looks similar from a distance. What I don't have is the thing people actually mean by the word. A plan. A confident, three-year, leather-bound plan, the kind you put in front of a board and watch them nod at like something has been decided.

I should say something about that word, strategy, because it has been abused so thoroughly that it now means almost nothing and charges a premium for it. Most of what goes by the name isn't strategy at all. It's a plan in a nicer suit. A plan is a list of things you intend to do and the money you intend to spend doing them. Its whole appeal, the reason grown adults will sit in a room for two days building one, is that it is made entirely of things you control. Costs. Headcount. Timelines. A neat column of boxes waiting to be checked. Nothing soothes an executive like checking off a box he drew himself.

Strategy offers no such comfort. It's a bet on the one thing you don't control, which is what everyone else decides to do. It asks you to back a judgment you can't prove, and then to close doors you would much rather leave open just in case. I've noticed that when a strategy leaves you calm and pleased with yourself, it is almost always a plan. A real one leaves you a little queasy, because you have placed a bet you can't defend and given up every other option to make it. We like planning for the same reason we like wading instead of swimming. You get to be in the water without the part where you drown.

For a long time you could pass one off as the other and never get caught. The world moved slowly enough that a thick, confident plan and an actual strategy looked identical from the outside, and nobody was rude enough to check. Then the ground started moving faster than the plans could be written, and the costume stopped working.

Strategy used to arrive like a decree

My father ran one of the big Swedish banks. When I was sixteen and unbearable, I asked him how the whole thing was actually steered. He answered like he was describing the tide. The bank ran on a decentralized structure, strong local branches, high mandate. It had been that way for years and would stay that way for years more. Strategy, in his world, was a permanent feature of the landscape. It came down from somewhere above, like weather, and your job was to carry it out without dropping it.

That world has quietly packed up and gone home. I can't tell you where AI will be in two years, and since I can't tell you that, I definitely can't tell you what advising a board on it will require of me by then. Sitting down to write a three-year plan under those conditions is a form of creative writing. Anyone who hands you a confident one right now is guessing, and charging you for the guess.

Why we happen to be winning

In fairness, I should account for the awkward fact that the firm is doing well, because it complicates the confession. More than eight times out of ten, when we sit down with a company we have never met, we walk out with a deal. My advisors call this product-market fit and tell me to enjoy it. I treat it as a warning.

The honest explanation isn't genius. It's timing. There is a gap in the market right now, and we happened to be standing in it when the music started. Almost nobody who is genuinely good at this technology is also good at sitting across the table from a CEO and being useful. The people who understand the machinery are mostly builders. The people who can advise a leadership team mostly work at big, respected firms that have been remarkably slow to go anywhere near the machinery.

They have been slow for a reason that says nothing about their intelligence and everything about their math. The whole firm is built on a wide base of junior analysts, hired by the dozen and billed by the hour. A technology that does a junior analyst's work in the time it takes to get a coffee is not an exciting opportunity to them. It's a small fire in the basement of a building they own. So they wait. And while they wait, the gap stays open, and I get to look smarter than I am for another quarter.

Which is exactly why I don't trust it. The morning the big firms figure out how to deliver this, a lot of very capable people with much better logos than mine get good at what I'm good at, fast. Betting the company on the gap staying open is betting that my competitors stay asleep, and my competitors are not paid to sleep.

Everyone gets the same answer now

There is one more problem, and it is the one that really finishes off the old idea of strategy. For most of business history, a real part of the edge was just seeing the situation more clearly than the other guy. The firm with the sharper analysts and the deeper research won. Insight was scarce, and scarce things are worth money.

That scarcity is gone. Ask a good AI model your single hardest strategic question and you'll get a genuinely excellent answer, the kind that would have cost you a team and six weeks not long ago. The problem shows up a second later. The model, by design, gives you the most common answer buried in everything ever written on the subject. The confident middle of the crowd, delivered without a trace of doubt. Which means your competitor, typing the same question into the same model, gets the same answer.

Picture the two of you showing up to the annual strategy offsite, each having quietly asked the machine what to do on the way there. You present your beautifully reasoned plan. He presents his. It's the same plan. You have shown up to the party in the same outfit, except the outfit is the future of your business, and neither of you can go home and change.

That leads somewhere uncomfortable. A strategy you can fully justify, from first principle to final slide, is now pretty good evidence that you don't have one. If the reasoning was available to you, it was available to him, at the same price, which is basically nothing. The answer you can defend is the answer everyone else already has. Prediction is a dead end, analysis is a public utility, and the advantage a century of business schools taught us to chase has quietly moved somewhere else.

A strategy you can fully justify is now pretty good evidence that you don't have one.

So I stopped trying to get anywhere

Here is what I do instead, and it's the closest thing I have to a strategy.

Since I can't know where the road goes, I stopped trying to arrive at a specific place on it, and started building an engine that does well wherever the road bends. For us that engine has a deeply unglamorous name. It's delivery. I want to turn work around faster than anyone else, deliver it cheaper than anyone else, and make it better than anyone else, all at the same time. The conventional wisdom is that you have to pick two and give up the third. The conventional wisdom is right, until you automate your own delivery so aggressively that the cost of excellent work falls through the floor. Then you get all three, and you get to be a little insufferable about it.

The good part has nothing to do with being clever. My competitors can't copy it, not for lack of brains but because of the plain arithmetic of their own books. The day the big firms match the service, I intend to be delivering ten times the work at a tenth of the cost, and they won't follow me there, because getting there means not billing the analysts their whole model depends on keeping busy. The one move that makes me faster and cheaper is the exact move they are punished for making. Having no pyramid to protect turns out, for once in a long run of disadvantages, to be the advantage.

And I'll admit this isn't abstract for me. I'm the founder, and I'm also the person in the room on most of our engagements, which means my own calendar is the hard limit on how many companies we can help and how well I can keep up with a field that reinvents itself every few weeks. For me, automation has nothing to do with efficiency. It's the only way I get to be useful to more people without slowly getting worse at the work. No framework talked me into it. My calendar did.

So no, I don't have a strategy in the sense my father would have recognized, the kind that comes down from above like weather and sits there for a decade. I have something smaller and harder and a lot more alive. One bet I can defend in every version of the future I can imagine, and the discipline to keep feeding it while the window is open.

If I could put one question to any leader who has read this far, it wouldn't be what your AI strategy is. You would just hand me a plan. It would be this. What are you building that keeps winning no matter where this technology goes next, and would your competitors even be allowed to copy it if they saw exactly how it works?