A Plan Is Not a Strategy

Err yeah it is mate, 😂

thank you for sharing that idea. I really appreciate it. This is going to be realization soon to be rewarded.

Is there always a competitor (particularly outside of a business context)? How does this change if the 'win' is a collaborative endeavour?

Only a fool reveals the strategy on internet..

How many of you can finish this: "In the beginning was the plan; and then came the assumptions..."

harvard people are idiots. i would noever hire them.

If someone is praying for help -> this is the sign -> stop planning, stop strategy -> start DOING, PUBLISHING, MAKING. In today's world we are all in some way victim of inaction through over thinking.

Plans are nothing ... Planning is everything
Eisenhower

Ökonomists are idiots...got it.

thank you

Planning is anticipation and preparation in advance, for the uncertain future events. Strategy is the best plan chosen among the various alternatives for accomplishment of objectives. Planning is like a map for guidance while strategy is the path which takes you to your destination.

Itulah keupayaan Dan kelebihan Harvard menguasai permikiran Dan kepandaian orang lain. Tawaran biasiswa, pembiayaan kajian dll. Sekarang tidak lagi, cukoplah kot. ..

amazing

Planning = false sense of security
Strategy = a way to focus and win

Wow this is a great video, its a slow burn but its very impactful

I have never heard this sharp an articulation of strategy as this. The way Prof Martin has explained this is incredibly clear and helps understand the difference between playing and winning.

📌 Key Takeaway from Roger Martin's Insight: The difference between "strategic planning" and true "strategy" is profound. While strategic planning often boils down to a list of actions or tasks without a cohesive goal, a genuine strategy provides a holistic vision with a clear pathway to achieving competitive outcomes.

✨ Some standout points:

Outcome vs. Activities: Strategy focuses on the desired outcome and the overall competitive edge, while planning tends to emphasize tasks.

Control vs. Influence: Planning is comforting because it revolves around things we can control, like costs. In contrast, strategy deals with influencing outcomes, particularly customer choices, which we can't control but can shape.

Real-World Example: Southwest Airlines' success story isn't just about doing things differently; it's about having a clear strategy that catered to a specific segment more effectively than competitors.

Avoiding the Planning Trap: Embrace the inherent uncertainty in strategy. While you can't guarantee success, having a clear, concise strategy and adjusting it as you gather more information gives you the best chance to win.

Remember: Strategy isn't about predicting the future; it's about making informed choices and adapting as you learn. Cheers to Roger for these invaluable insights!🚀📊

Some organizations use chronic planning as escapism, they're comforting and they make you look like you're doing something right

Let me simplify: A plan is what you can control, which will get you only so far. A strategy is being born into the right family or stealing enough money to bribe the right official. Plan all you want, but you better have a strategy.

Typical professor lost in semantics and out of touch with the world. Time to get back to actually doing the job. United Airlines has 5x the net income of Southwest Airlines so saying Southwest is “winning” is subjective as hell.
Companies don’t just build factories for the sake of it, obviously they plan to sell product.

nice sir

Are you talkinng about strategy or about how should i live my life? Perfect specha!! Big UP

Don't know how this video popped up in my suggestions but it definitely gives me clarity in the most simplest way for me to be successful in all I do. Thank you!

best

I’m not sure why this video was recommended to me, but it resonates with my work. I’m an instructional designer who used to be a curriculum designer, and I always explained the difference as curriculum design (CD) being the “what” and instructional design (ID) being the “how”. What I will say now is that CD is the plan and ID is the strategy. Thank you!

Planning... What? Then what? Then what?...
Strategizing... What If? + How? + Why?

Wow.😲

ROGER MARTIN: This thing called planning has been around for a long, long time. People would plan out the activities they're going to engage in. More recently, has been a discipline called strategy. People have put those two things together to call something strategic planning. Unfortunately, those things are not the same: strategy and planning. So just putting them together and calling it strategic planning doesn't help.

What most *strategic planning* is in the world of business has nothing to do with strategy. It's got the word, but it's not. *It's a set of activities that the company says it's going to do.* We're going to improve customer experience. We're going to open this new plant. We're going to start a new talent development program. A whole list of them, and they all sound good, but the results of all of those are not going to make the company happy because they didn't have a strategy...

So what's a strategy? A strategy is an integrative set of choices that positions you on a playing field of your choice in a way that you win. So there's a theory. Strategy has a theory. Here's why we should be on this playing field, not this other one, and here's how, on that playing field, we're going to be better than anybody else at serving the customers on that playing field. That theory has to be coherent. It has to be doable. You have to be able to translate that into actions for it to be a great strategy. Planning does not have to have any such coherence, and it typically is what people in manufacturing want - the few things they want, to build a new plant, and the marketing people want to launch a new brand, and the talent people want to hire more people that tends to be a list that has no internal coherence to it and no specification of a way that that is going to accomplish collectively some goal for the company.

See, planning is quite comforting. Plans typically have to do with the resources you're going to spend. So we're going to build a plan. We're going to hire some people. We're going to launch a new product. Those are all things that are on the cost side of businesses. Who controls your costs? Who's the customer of your costs? The answer is, you are. You decide how many square feet to lease, how many raw materials to buy, how many people to hire. Those are more comfortable because you control them.

A strategy, on the other hand, specifies an outcome, a competitive outcome that you wish to achieve, which involves customers wanting your product or service enough that they will buy enough of it to make the profitability that you'd like to make. The tricky thing about that is that you don't control them. You might wish you could, but you can't. They decide, not you. That's a harder trick. So that means putting yourself out and saying, here's what we believe will happen. We can't prove it in advance, we can't guarantee it, but this is what we want to have happen and that we believe will happen. It's much easier to say, I'll build a factory, I will hire more people, et cetera, than I will have customers end up liking our offering more than those of competitors. The tricky thing about planning is that while you're planning, chances are at least one competitor is figuring out how to win.

When US air carriers were busily planning what routes to fly and da-da-da, there was this little company in Texas called Southwest that had a strategy for winning. And at first, that looked largely irrelevant because it was tiny. What Southwest Airlines was aiming for was an **outcome**. What they wanted to be is a substitute for Greyhound, a way more convenient way to get around at a price that wasn't extraordinarily much greater than a Greyhound bus.

Southwest said, everybody else is flying hub and spoke. They have hubs, and they fly hub and spoke. We're going to fly point to point so that we don't have aircraft waiting on the ground because you only make money when you're in the air. We're going to only fly 737s, one kind of aircraft, so that our gates are set up for those, our systems are set up for those, our training, our simulations are set up. We're not going to offer meals on the flights because we're going to specialize in short flights.

We're not going to book through travel agents. We're going to encourage people to book online because that's less expensive for everybody and more convenient. So their strategy ended up having a substantially lower cost than any of the major carriers so that they could offer substantially lower prices. Because it had a way of winning, it got bigger and then bigger and then bigger and then bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until it flies the most passenger seat miles in America.

The major carriers were not trying to win against one another. They were all playing to play, as I say. They were playing to participate, maybe buy more planes, get more gates, maybe grow some, **not having a theory of here's how we could be better than our competitors**. And that was fine until somebody came along and said, **here's a way to be better than everybody else for this segment**. And so that segment then goes. It's gone. And the main playing to play players have to share a smaller pie that's left over after Southwest takes whatever share it wants.

If you're trying to escape this planning trap, this comfort trap of doing something that's comfortable but not good for you, how do you start? The most important thing to recognize is that strategy will have *angst* associated with it. It'll make you feel somewhat nervous because as a manager, chances are you've been taught you should do things that you can prove in advance.


You can't prove in advance that your strategy will succeed. You can look at a plan and say, well, all of these things are doable. Let's just do those because they're within our control. But they won't add up to much. In strategy, you have to say, if our theory is right about what we can do and how the market will react, this will position us in an excellent way. Just accept the fact that you can't be perfect on that, and you can't know for sure. And that is not being a bad manager. That is being a great leader because you're giving your organization the chance to do something great.

The second thing I do is say, lay out the logic of your strategy clearly. What would have to be true about ourselves, about the industry, about competition, about customers for this strategy to work? Why do you do that? It's because you can then watch the world unfold. And if something that you say is in the logic that would have to be true for this to work is not working out quite the way you hoped, it'll allow you to tweak your strategy. And strategy is a journey, what you want to have as a mechanism for tweaking it, honing it, and refining it so it gets better and better as you go along.

Another thing that helps with strategy is not letting it get overcomplicated. It's great if you can write your strategy on a single page. Here's where we're choosing to play. Here's how we're choosing to win. Here are the capabilities we need to have in place. Here are the management systems. And that's why it's going to achieve this goal, this aspiration that we have. Then you lay out the logic, what must be true for that all to work out the way we hope.

Go do it, and watch and tweak as you go along. That may feel somewhat more worry-making, angst-making than planning, but I would tell you that if you plan, that's a way to guarantee losing. If you do strategy, it gives you the best possible chance of winning.

Thank you! Straight, short, clear and encouraging explanation.

This has been very eye opening.

how comes the movies always say a plan of action, not a, say, strategy for actions.. it’s semantics. cos it’s the same darn thing.

ever watched a movie where the characters expect things to go as “planned”?????? they call it a “plan,”but in spirit, they strategize. so they can maintain dominance in the end. guess when it’s on a personal level, things are different from when a group of people work on a large company.

great vid, tho. the clarity is appreciated.

To simplify: writing out your Todo list for the day is a plan but not a Strategy.

Thank You for this video.

Thank you, this was so helpful in getting clear on my business.

To make your point, I agree with your premise that a plan is not a strategy. However, I have seen plans that were a set of strategies.

I believe a better distinction between a strategy and a plan is to recognize that strategies are “decisions” that could be implemented in different ways.

Here is an elaboration.

Strategy is a set of “decisions” that are made before “activities” come into play. To use a military analogy, here are some examples:
* What wars will you participate in?
* What battles will you fight?
* Where?
* Who will be your allies?

In business, here are some examples of strategies:
* What is your mission?
* What structure (sole proprietorship, corporation, LLC) will you use?
* What will be your products?
* Who will be your customers?

“Activities”, actions, projects, etc. describe what to do. Again, using the military analogy, here are some examples that come into play during battles:
* Attack the enemy tomorrow night.
* Dig a trench this side of the hill.
* Send a scout out to determine which way the enemy forces are moving.

Here are some examples of “Activities” that occur during the running of a business:
* Hire a twenty-five 1099 employees.
* Switch to recycled carboard.
* Change from supplier A to supplier B.

Related point: Strategies are not “Objectives”. One “Objective” likely has multiple strategies that could be used to achieve it.

The simple distinction is that is plans end in competition while strategy ends in victory. For example, if I plan to build a house, this will involve external elements and uncertainty, but its still only a plan. Victory only occurs once you have defeated someone or thing. Simple test, you claim you have won but can you point out who you have defeated.

thought it was Claudio Ranieri 😅

Estratégia é dançar no meio da tempestade contando com sorte e inteligência, acreditando piamente que vai dar certo porque você é um doido, doidos tem um ego forte.

I'm from Indonesia, I have a study permit. Thank You

I would say (it's just my oponion), that in business it's useless to know exact definitions of these words.

And strategy should be build on believes…!!

Between planning and executing is strategy which is why it’s called a strategic plan

“Plan your work and work your plan”
Strategy is nothing more than how you’re going to implement the plan. When he explained what was going on with Southwest Airlines he laid out their plan. If you have a strategy with no plan, how you’re going to attain your goal? I’m not sure how you can say that strategies more important than the plan.

amazIng video, deffintiely a mind-opener

Tell us something we don't already know, please.