STRATEGY
“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
Improving effectiveness, efficiency or making great products is not strategy, it’s what you have to do. It’s like saying, our bank’s strategy is to ensure we keep our profitable customers happy, that’s not strategy, that’s just obvious.
Strategy essentially means making a choice between more than one equally powerful idea.
Unless there is a tradeoff, there would be no need to choose, hence no strategy. The idea is to make a series of choices that give you an unfair advantage.
It’s what Indigo airlines did, when everyone was talking inflight dining, entertainment and focusing on making the experience memorable, they went another way. They decided to focus on reducing flight time and faster turnarounds.
Similarly, what Fogg did, when everyone was talking the attraction/ confidence language, they went and spoke about value and wastage.
Come to think of it, where does the word decide actually come from?
It has its roots in Middle English deciden, Old French decider, and Latin decidere and you can tell there’s the prefix de-, meaning “off” and -cide which is associated with “cut” and “kill”.
It’s when you make a choice and cut out all the other possible choices, that’s strategy.