More and more organizational leaders say they have a strategy, but they do not. Instead, they espouse what I call bad strategy. Bad strategy tends to skip over pesky details such as problems. It ignores the power of choice and focus, trying instead to accommodate a multitude of conflicting demands and interests.

Like Harvester’s, they do not identify and come to grips with the fundamental obstacles and problems that stand in the organization’s way. Looking at most of this product, or listening to the managers who have produced it, you will find an almost total lack of strategic thinking. Instead, you will find high-sounding sentiments together with plans to spend more and somehow “get better.

A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.

It is often said that a strategy is a choice or a decision. The words “choice” and “decision” evoke an image of someone considering a list of alternatives and then selecting one of them.

In the case at hand, Hannibal was certainly not briefed by a staff presenting four options arranged on a PowerPoint slide. Rather, he faced a challenge and he designed a novel response. Today, as then, many effective strategies are more designs than decisions—are more constructed than chosen… When someone says “Managers are decision makers,” they are not talking about master strategists, for a master strategist is a designer.