Strategy is what you do, not what you say

There’s the strategy you say you have, and then there’s the strategy your actions reveal you actually have.

Be honest about it. You can’t fix what you don’t first admit.

“Our actual strategy is to ignore our strategic roadmap and instead build whatever Sales needs to close the next deal.”

“Our actual strategy is to spend 30% of every week overreacting to one bad week of one KPI.”

“Our actual strategy is to avoid doing anything risky and hoping we can reach our goal by optimizing what we have.”

This is why I think it’s so important that companies have quarterly OKRs¹ followed by and end-of-quarter review of how it went, what we learned, and what we could do better next time.

We need to be able to say, “Actually, we spent 50% of our time on maintenance and bug fixing because our dev ops and tech debt are in such bad shape.”

Or, “We didn’t hit our OKRs because, 5 weeks into the quarter, the founder told us to drop what we were doing and do this other thing, based on a podcast² he listened to the night before.”

The best companies own their bullshit and hold everyone, at any level, accountable. And then, they fix it.

The Workshop

This is a newsletter-only section where I share a half-baked idea in hopes that y’all who are smarter than me can work it out with me.

LinkedIn launched Games yesterday and it got me thinking about what LinkedIn’s strategy is, vs. what I think it should be.

As an outsider, it seems like their strategy is: 1) Add GenAI features to Premium to drive more upgrades; 2) Add Games to increase DAUs, to have more ad inventory to sell; 3) …. I actually can’t think of a third. Maybe it has something to do with Sales Navigator or Recruiter; I don’t have access to those tools.

I wish they would spend more time improving what they already have. I would describe LinkedIn’s core functionality as: 1) the profile, as a shareable object; 2) search, as the primary way to discover profiles (with Pro versions for Sales and Recruiters); 3) the feed, as a driver of engagement, virality, and distribution; 4) content creation tools, as the engine that fuels the feed; 5) the jobs marketplace, to drive engagement for individuals and companies, and sell more Recruiter upgrades and ads; 6) Ads, for monetization of the feed and jobs marketplace; 7) messaging & groups, for increasing quality of connection and community.

That’s a ton of stuff. And my opinion is they have not hit diminishing returns on any of it. Even purely from the POV of “only do things that grow revenue”, I think improving what they already have could create more ad inventory than Games or sell more Premium than shoving GenAI everywhere: better content tools to increase feed content; better Premium features when using Search / messaging / viewing profiles; better ways to discover interesting people, content, or community.

So it’s interesting to wonder — how did they end up with the strategy they do have? What about their culture and their process led them to these choices? Why do they have that culture and process? How did it serve them in the past, and is it still serving them today?

1  Or the equivalent: some described strategy and measurable outcomes to know if the strategy is working and progressing at the pace needed

2  Or insert here: “investor he spoke with”, “dream he had”, “conversation he had with a prospect”, etc. And yeah, it’s probably a “he”.