Strategy Is Choice
Martin’s definition of strategy, held for twenty-five years and then sharpened: an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action.
The original version, used for a quarter of a century: an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition. The update, circa 2023, is shorter: an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action.
What the rewrite removed, and why
Positioning, sustainable advantage, superior returns: all gone from the sentence, not because they are wrong but because they already live inside the Strategy Choice Cascade and did not need saying twice. What the rewrite added is the point of the whole exercise: compelling customer action. A company controls nearly everything about itself, pricing, hiring, product, structure, spend. The one thing it cannot control is what the customer does. Strategy configures everything you do control to move the one thing you don't, which is why the customer is the only judge of whether it worked.
Three load-bearing words
Choices: to do some things and not others, tested by the Opposite Test. Integrated: the choices reinforce each other rather than coexist, the property examined in Integration. Compels: the output is customer behaviour, not internal alignment, and a strategy whose evidence is a completed rollout has not yet produced any. Everything that fails on one of the three words is catalogued in Strategy Impostors or embodied in Playing to Play.
How this connects to OKRs
The definition sets the standard our goal methodology inherits. If strategy is choices that compel customer action, then the quarter's OKRs are the instrument that detects the compulsion: Key Results written as customer behaviour changing from X to Y, not as internal milestones completing on schedule. A goal system that cannot tell you whether customers moved is measuring the wrong end of the strategy.
One line to keep: Strategy is choices that compel customer action; the OKR is how you detect the compulsion.
Our synthesis of Roger Martin’s published work, sources credited. Read the originals: they’re excellent.
What is Roger Martin's definition of strategy? +
An integrated set of choices that compels the customer to choose you. The “compels customer action” clause is the update that matters: it puts the test of a strategy outside the building, in what customers actually do.
How does that definition change OKRs? +
It sets the standard for a Key Result: customer behaviour changing from X to Y, not an internal milestone completing on schedule. A goal system that cannot tell you whether customers moved is measuring the wrong end.
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