Strategy is simply the basic methodology you intend to apply to attain your company’s current mission. “This is how we will achieve our mission.” That, in a nutshell, is strategy. There’s no mystery to it. It’s not a difficult concept.

It isn’t. Really, strategy is about making specific choices to win in the marketplace. According to Mike Porter, author of Competitive Strategy, perhaps the most widely respected book on strategy ever written, a firm creates a sustainable competitive

advantage over its rivals by “deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver unique value.” Strategy therefore requires making explicit choices—to do some things and not others—and building a business around those choices.

Executives who complain about “execution” problems have usually confused strategy with goal setting. When the “strategy” process is basically a game of setting performance goals—so much market share and so much profit, so many students graduating high school, so many visitors to the museum—then there remains a yawning gap between these ambitions and action. Strategy is about how an organization will move forward. Doing strategy is figuring out how to advance the organization’s interests.

A strategy is a way through a difficulty, an approach to overcoming an obstacle, a response to a challenge. If the challenge is not defined, it is difficult or impossible to assess the quality of the strategy. And if you cannot assess a strategy’s quality, you cannot reject a bad strategy or improve a good one.

People normally think of strategy in terms of action—a strategy is what an organization does. But strategy also embodies an approach to overcoming some difficulty. Identifying the difficulties and obstacles will give you a much clearer picture of the pattern of existing and possible strategies.