New managers sometimes ask me, “A decade into the job, what’s something you’re still continuing to learn?” My answer is, “How to be the best leader I can while staying true to who I am.”

Managers so often think of the role as being in service to something else—the mission of the organization, the goals of the team, the needs of others—that it’s easy to forget about the most important character in your management journey: you.

With the absence of a policy, most people look around their department to understand the “soft limits” of what’s acceptable. I have always been interested in travel and before we lifted our vacation policy I already tried to take a good amount. But after we lifted the policy I started talking a lot more about those vacations to anyone who was willing to listen.

Businesses do not maximise anything. The most successful business leaders such as Marks or Walton or Gates pursued the unquantifiable, but entirely meaningful, objective of building a great business. A great business is very good at doing the things we expect it to do— rewarding its investors, providing satisfying employment, offering goods and services of good quality at reasonable prices, fulfilling a role in the community— and to fail in any of these is, in the long run, to fall in all of them.

Good guiding policies are not goals or visions or images of desirable end states. Rather, they define a method of grappling with the situation and ruling out a vast array of possible actions.

You may correctly observe that many other people use the term “strategy” for what I am calling the “guiding policy.” I have found that defining a strategy as just a broad guiding policy is a mistake. Without a diagnosis, one cannot evaluate alternative guiding policies. Without working through to at least the first round of action one cannot be sure that the guiding policy can be implemented. Good strategy is not just “what” you are trying to do. It is also “why” and “how” you are doing it.

A good guiding policy tackles the obstacles identified in the diagnosis by creating or drawing upon sources of advantage. Indeed, the heart of the matter in strategy is usually advantage.