5 Strategy: The Decision-Making Razor
This chapter is currently in draft form.
Strategy sits at the apex of the leverage hierarchy because it does something no other lever can: it enables your organization to make decisions in your absence. Strategy is a razor. It helps you and your org “shave away” unnecessary assumptions, explanations, or options. Think of it as a mental tool for simplifying reasoning.
I’ve walked into too many organizations where leadership claimed to have strategy but couldn’t articulate it when pressed—or worse, offered useless platitudes like “Be good” or “Hire smart people.” These feel-good mantras are worse than useless. They’re a security blanket in a foxhole. They make you feel better, but they’re not going to stop bullets.
Consider the CTO who tells me their strategy is “technical excellence.” What does that mean when the sales team demands a feature that requires cutting corners? How does “technical excellence” help an engineer choose between refactoring legacy code and building new capabilities? It doesn’t. It’s a platitude masquerading as strategy.
That is the kind of strategy we see most often. So those of us in the crucible of technology organizations have become dismissive of strategy. We dismiss it as a waste of time. We dismiss it as a distraction. We dismiss it as a luxury. That’s a mistake. It’s like dismissing knives as useless because you keep trying to cut with the handle.
Strategy commands the apex of the leverage hierarchy precisely because, as Alfred Chandler showed sixty years ago, misalignment at the strategic level cascades through everything downstream (Chandler, 1962). When strategy fails, structure follows that failure.
A strategy that doesn’t guide real trade-offs isn’t a strategy. Rumelt calls real strategy “diagnosis, focus, and coherent action” (Rumelt, 2011): sharp decisions that technical leaders can actually use. Do we build or buy? Optimize for velocity or reliability? Invest in automation or accept manual processes? If your strategy can’t answer these questions, you don’t have strategy. Martin’s “Playing to Win” cascade (Martin and Lafley, 2013) makes the same point differently: each strategic choice (where to play, how to win, required capabilities) constrains the next, creating the sharp trade-offs that actually guide decisions.
Neither framework emphasizes this enough for technical leaders: your strategy must be instantly articulable by every member of your team. If your team members can’t explain the strategy in two minutes to a new hire, you don’t have strategy.
5.1 Building Strategy Downward
Most technical leaders face a different problem. Your company already has a strategy, and it’s useless.
Don’t try to improve your company’s strategy unless you have a very unique relationship with your CEO and other senior leaders. It’s a waste of political capital that you need for other battles.
Focus downward instead. If the strategy truly is weak, vague, contradictory, or nonexistent, that actually works in your favor. Garbage strategy has no guardrails, which means your technical strategy will align by default. You’re free to create the decision-making razor your teams need without interference.
This is, admittedly, a quiet inversion of Chandler’s principle. He argued that structure follows strategy, implying strategy flows down from the top. That’s the view from the ivory tower. In the trenches, it’s dirtier. When top-level strategy is absent or incoherent, you don’t have the luxury of waiting for someone else to fix it. You build what your teams need and let the absence of guardrails above you become permission to lead.
If your leadership is dismissive of strategy but doesn’t care what you do day-to-day, that can actually be your sweet spot. You can’t be seen focusing on strategy, that will cost you political capital because you’re “focused on the wrong things” as defined by your stakeholders. However, if you just do strategy definition as side-of-desk work and roll it out through your normal communications without making it a big production, you can capture most of the benefits without burning political capital.
If your CEO has strong opinions about strategy and you don’t see the ability to set independent direction because they’ll be invasive, that’s also okay. Don’t waste capital fighting a battle you can’t win. Strategy is highly leveraged and valuable, but it’s not the only lever you can pull.
Success requires recognizing which battles to fight and how to fight them. Save your political capital for the structural and people changes where you have more control and can generate immediate impact. Sometimes the most strategic thing you can do is ignore strategy entirely and focus on the levers you can pull.
Chandler was right: structure follows strategy. Sharp strategy makes every downstream decision cleaner. Dull strategy makes every cut messier.