What is Strategy? The Ultimate Guide to Strategic Thinking in 2025 for CEOs and Owners

For anybody who's thinking about strategy in particular now in all this uncertainty, I think it's a must read because the old rules just don't apply. In my opinion, this is one of the best strategy books ever. I love it. I've got it all marked up and dog eared. I got to read advanced copies. I've gotten to talk with you, Rebecca, over the years about the concepts went into the book. And for anybody who's thinking about strategy in particular now in all this uncertainty, I think it's a must read because the old rules just don't apply. And I know you're talking everywhere about how to apply this. You just were at a Proctor and Gamble, like for a Proctor and Gamble event or a publication. What was that?

Yeah, so I gave one of the keynotes at Proctor and Gamble's Signal Innovation conference last year and then I wrote a follow up article for their Spring Innovation edition.

Yeah, it's very cool because one of the things for anybody that wonders, do the ideas from early stage and high growth companies apply at the corporate level? A lot of your clients are larger and taking your research and your work with high growth companies and learning to work that into what they do, which is pretty cool. So uncertainty is on everybody's mind. And we were talking before I started recording. I talk with a lot of leaders that are maybe new to their role or just we're in a time that is uncertain. As a leader, you have to take a stand. You have to say here's what I think and here's what we're going to do. And you've actually developed a way to track that and work that into your operating rhythms as you execute. Let's talk about that a little.

Yeah, I think, look, we are operating in a different world and I think we need to caveat, Scott, that we've always faced uncertainty. Like trying to set and execute strategy through uncertainty is nothing new. And like strategy was based in military strategy, which by definition is in a world of uncertainty. But there is something empirically about the pace of change, the volatility of change, and not just change in the macro environment, but in the micro environment and people's organizations. We are facing a heightened level of uncertainty. And that puts a challenge on strategy because the whole notion of strategy is make a plan and execute the plan. And what happens to that discipline when I'm making a plan with very limited information about how the next one to three years is going to pan out. So we need to acknowledge that the definition of strategy as an art of creating Value has not changed. But how we approach defining and executing strategy does need to change and adapt for the changing situation that we're operating in now.

And we don't have to go over it again because we have great clips and a great episode on what is strategy and what is value that you provided to us with the needles moving apart. But I feel like this for a big part of my career, this was the unspoken. We just won't say anything about it. We'll just keep making the plans and doing the plans. So now what are we going to do to manage the uncertainty? Because there's definitely. I know uncertainty's always been there, but the pace of change right now I've got a car that can drive me places.

Yeah.

There are all kinds of crazy things that are happening. What do we do now to build that into our planning and our rhythms? And you talk about loops, not lines.

Yeah.

Tell us what you're having your clients do and what people can expect when they're reading the book.

Let's start with a pretty critical reframe. Okay. Is that when we use the word uncertainty? Small teams, large teams, big companies, small companies. We tend, Scott, to put a word before uncertainty. That means it's going to be bad. We ask each other, hey, how are you managing uncertainty? How are you going to overcome uncertainty? How are you dealing with uncertainty? We frame uncertainty as a risk or a challenge to get through, to presumably get back to this wonderful world of certainty. You need to start any of these conversations with a very powerful reframe that the definition of uncertainty is a series of future events which may or may not occur. Whether or not those events are good or bad depends on what we're trying to do and how we're set up. That is your role as a leader. Figure out what you want to do and then get set up to succeed in that world. So the reframe is critical because many trends are changing and shaping the environment. There's a growth opportunity in every trend. Strategy is deciding which of those we want to prioritize to take forward that.

That idea of prioritization and making decisions. I think there's a lot I've seen written about or things that I would say that imply that great leadership is you. You make these grandiose bets and you go all in on them. And I think that feels to me like that's not really accurate. Yes, we see a direction, but we're not so hard headed that we run off a cliff if it turns out there's a cliff in there. So go Ahead. Are you going to say something?

Yeah. So let's tackle that. Right. I spend a lot of time talking about the uncertainty that we're facing and what it takes to deal with that. But then I also talk to teams about the criticality of what I call a finish line. Right. Is I tend to moving away from the words of vision, mission, purpose, because every company uses them differently. Some are helpful, most are a waste of time. Right. And so just I like to anchor in this powerful visual, which we all know the visual of a finish line, like finish lines matter. Growth strategies need a finish line. Right. One of the biggest reasons companies do not execute their strategies is they have no idea what it would look like if they did. Right. Because everyone has a long list of rocks or KPIs or OKRs. We're not actually aligned on the finish line. Finish lines matter. But you can and should rightfully say, hey, Rebecca, you just talked about all this uncertainty and we're facing more uncertainty. And now you want me to set a finish line? What gives? I'll tell you. We have a choice in a finish line. As you just mentioned, Scott, we can set a direction or a destination sometimes for your team or organization, depending on the level you're setting. Strategy. You need a destination. You need to say, by the end of 2026, we're going to have 100 million revenue at 15% profit margin and 5 million of EBITDA in the bank. And we're going to have our products will be ranked xyz. That's sometimes needed. But if as a team, you're facing extreme uncertainty or you're shifting your business model or there's disruptive innovation in your space, destinations are incredibly unhelpful because you will anchor the team on something that is unknown and untested. And we're going to learn as we go that's no longer the correct or accurate, precise place that we want to be tracking towards. So instead we set a direction and you say, hey, I know we're going this way and we're going to learn and make it more precise as we go. And I like to liken the difference between thinking about taking a trip is am I taking exit 405 for Santa Monica or am I going northwest? Am I getting up my compass with a direction or am I going to a precise destination? So that's what I want us to think about. Do you need a direction or a destination? Both work. Both are finish lines, but we need them in different instances at different points in time.

How does someone make the Decision, they're going to go for a direction versus a destination.

If you are a publicly traded company or you have a very specific shareholder event, like an exit, a buyout, et cetera, you likely do need a destination. Right now, you'll want to align that destination based on your beliefs, which we've spoken about. And we can dig into a little bit more. If I go through, are we facing extreme uncertainty, which for many folks, they are, given the current level of uncertainty of tariffs, are we shifting our business model? Are we going from a hardware to a software, from a product to a service or solution, or is there disruptive innovation in our space? Are we in a market or industry where AI is fundamentally disrupting business models? If one of those three things applies? Extreme uncertainty, shifting business model, disruptive innovation, you need a direction. If you have a very specific shareholder event, you need a destination. Everything in between just depends on the current circumstances of your team.

That's a great rubric. I was just having a conversation with someone at lunch about this idea of beliefs and tracking your beliefs, and he right away kind of misunderstood and started talking about, oh, yeah, you got to have your why and your vision and those things. I was like, no, we need to talk about the beliefs in the macro environment, in the micro environment. What are the things that are going to change? Do we need to do to pivot? So how you advocate for documenting those beliefs.

Right, yes.

And that's a tip. I've seen help. So I've given. I've passed that tip along to so many people and it has helped tremendously.

I'm so glad to hear that. Yeah. Is in strategy execution, less is more. But there's a more here you actually need two trackers. You need your priority tracker and you also need your belief tracker. Because if you start the premise that we are setting and executing a strategy in a world that is changing. Right. The very first question we often ask each other as a team when we sit down to review strategy, we get in the room, we start the meeting, we're going to review our strategy. What I found, Scott, is someone always likes to open that meeting with asking this question. They say, are we on track to plan? And I get it right, we want to be on track to plan. If you have a board, that's usually the first question we ask. But in strategy, I want the first question that review meeting to be, has the situation changed? Right. Has the situation changed? Because if the situation's changed, being on track to plan may or may not be a good thing. But much more importantly, we need to be talking about that, given the changed situation, what should we be doing instead? And that's about setting your critical beliefs. Now, beliefs are not religious dogmas, right? Beliefs are when it comes to supply chain or currency fluctuations or changing consumer preferences or demand for talent. What's your midterm belief? And we're not trying to predict the future because we can't, but a midterm stance or belief, you want it specific enough, you can test it, but not so precise.

You're getting into prediction territory, I think that bears emphasizing. You said specific enough, you can test it. Yes, and that's really critical. Find that people will say we have this belief. So let's wait and see. Which I get sometimes appropriate, but it sometimes it's an excuse for not taking action and learning. And then equally, which I like about the approach you recommend, which has a table where you're tracking these things. And then equally, we're going to come in and oh, the situation changed. So we're going to throw everything out the window, which a portion of the time might actually be the right thing to do. But if you're not actually tracking that, you made that decision and you and doing it with some discipline, you can fall victim to shiny squirrel or shiny squirrel. I just mix two ideas. Shiny object and squirrel.

Okay, I was with you. I was with this. We spent so much time together, I was with you. You know what's funny, Scott, is that when you start tracking your beliefs, you sometimes realize you need to change your strategy less than you would have anticipated. Right? And here's what I mean by that. The discipline of saying, here's the top 10 or 15 trends most shaping our strategic environment based on those trends, here's critical beliefs and the implications. Here's what we're doing because we take these beliefs when there's changing trends again. Could be a new tariff rate, it could be a different geopolitical tension, it could be new insights on consumers. I can look to my beliefs and say, does this challenge my beliefs? And yes, sometimes it does, but a lot, it actually becomes this breath of air where you say, okay, yes, I know it looks like this is actually very volatile, but our midterm belief remains firm even with this new piece of information. So rather than spending half a day figuring out what we're going to do differently, we spend a few moments, we look at our belief tracker, we acknowledge, hey, the belief is still on track and we're still executing what we're doing. Now when those beliefs are challenged, we're going to change and that's okay because we've communicated to the team based on these beliefs. These are our choices. When those beliefs are challenged, I now have permission to change. Right. Because I caveated those choices and key priorities we're working on. We set those because of our beliefs. But hey, our beliefs are challenged. It's now okay to change.

The other thing I like that this makes me think of is you've actually identified title of the book. Again, we'll show the book, but that you've identified that there's different modes of operation that we need to move through based on what we're seeing just to. Just for people that aren't familiar with it. And I think everybody, as I said, should read the book. When are you moving from survive? When do you recognize, hey, right now we just need to survive. We need to take drastic measures now. When is it a reset time? When are we moving into thrive?

Yeah, you work with entrepreneurs and also about every industry, Scott, and they probably are going to say just skip ahead because I just want to hear about the thrive stage or at least that's the request that I most frequently get. And I know I have mentioned this to you and I got to know, but I'll just share that. When I wrote the book, I had this great idea and I told the publisher. So here's what I want to do. I want to just sell the first 10 chapters of the book, right? The Survive and the Reset. And then people can send an email and say, hey, I've read that. I've done that work. Now I'll take the thrive chapters because you've got to do the hard work of the earlier chapters first. Now that idea was shut down, but I want the theory of that to still live, right? You do need to do the hard work of the survive and the reset to get to thrive. Survive. The misconception about survive is about recessions. There's a recession, we go into survive mode. Scott. Great. Survive is proactive. Survive. Thrive companies are those who always employ what I call steady state survive. They're always proactively stabilizing the organization. They are set up to take the punches the market. Right. Throw. Because the market's always going to throw punches. It could be a surprise interest rate or inflation, a war that some folks are facing right now, a changing regulation in some spaces, a new technology, a disruption. Even if you're doing steady state survive, you're still going to do a pause when there's a shock to the system. You're going to go through your survive basics, which I like to call the four Cs for cash cost, customers and communication. Now if you've done this right, you've actually set with your team, hey, here's the minimum thresholds. We need to be on cash, on cost, on customer retention, on communication. So when you do go into survive mode, you have less work to do. You're not deciding, you're just doing right. You pre decided before the crisis situation. And that's the key. We make better decisions when we decide ex ante, not in the crisis moment. Once you've got those and you've employed some of these power moves, then you move into the reset. The reset is a period of survive, reset, thrive, which is the power move. One of my frustrations from reading articles or the conference circuit is you'll often see a title of a conference that says don't just survive, thrive or you need to survive to thrive. And what these titles always miss is the power move. The reset is the power move because reset means change. Reset means based on the new situation, we're going to adjust and adapt our organization. Reset should also be temporary, usually a couple of months, depending on the size of the organization. It's a larger organization or a bigger change, it could be up to a year. Then you'll go back to your thrive stage, that successful and consistent high performance, ideally performing better and higher than others in your industry.

Even in smaller companies, I'm noticing there's a different, slightly different language they use. But I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurial companies and there's some form of this going on. And the language around it may be different, but something happens where the business has to shift and it's not all. It can be internal and I find it follows a very similar map. So this is the basis that you offer your clients for coming up with strategy? Yes, and this is something I've seen personally. I've seen clients fly from all over the world to celebrate the book launch, coming a long way to do that and talk about how well it's worked for them. You have. You take a very different approach than what people traditionally think of as strategy. If you go Google strategy, you get all these images of a swot chart, the quadrant, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats that in your view. And I'll just say, what do you think of that as the way to do strategy?

Look, strategy has a definition which shouldn't be debated, right. Strategy is an articulation of how an organization creates value creation, driving the biggest gap possible between two things. On one hand, your customers or clients Willingness to pay your products, services and solutions. The other hand, your total cost of getting it to them, that we shouldn't debate anymore how you develop it. Sure, there's different approaches. The challenge and what I find fault with most existing ways of doing it are it's either a big consulting firm who does a bunch of interviews and a bunch of scenario planning, puts a bunch of stuff into AI and gives you a very big thick packet of PowerPoint you will never read in full, let alone do anything with, or you try to hack it very quickly by doing a SWOT and then an EOS template with some rock planning. Now, there's good stuff in all of those versions, right? But swots not done well are an incredible waste of time. You're just making a big list of stuff, right? List of stuff is not strategy. You're not prioritizing, you're not talking about the changing situation. And swots, actually, what's most unhelpful about them and the list of lists is very unhelpful. What's most unhelpful about swats is it forces you to bucket everything into it's either good or bad. And that's the challenge that I take with it. There is a growth opportunity in every trend in the industry, right? Your job as a leader is to find those growth opportunities and then prioritize which ones you're going to take. Right now, you will have some threats. I call these the kickers and killers, which you need to protect yourself against. But bucketing everything is good or bad, not very helpful. And when it comes to your strengths, having strengths is great. It doesn't matter if everyone else in the industry has the same strengths. What matters in the strengths is differentiation and differentiation that your customers are willing to pay for. And I like to capture that in what I call the right to win analysis. Right to win being what we have that others don't, and what we can do that others can't, and how we can build moats. That's truly what matters. Scott, I want to repeat, having strengths is interesting, but doesn't really matter if everyone else in the industry has the same strengths. Your job is to tease out your unique differentiation, which is your right to win. What you have that others don't, what you can do that others can't, how you can build moats around your advantage.

And then testing those beliefs and then testing those.

The challenge companies have with their right to win, and it's funny, you can see this picked up in very inconsistent swats is you ask them to think about where the industry is going, like what their top beliefs are. Then you ask them to think about their differentiation and they talk about their historical differentiation, how we differentiated ourselves in the past. But what really matters in strategy, especially growth strategy, is what's our differentiation in the world we believe will happen in this future world we spend crowding out. We what's our differentiation there? That's what's critical to think about.

I like that. I'm definitely sharing this with a few of our customers that I know are thinking in these ways. I'm looking at the belief tracker, I'm looking at all the different pages I have dog eared. We've got finish line. We've talked through direction versus destination, tracking your beliefs, tracking priorities, making sure you're tracking a plan, using an assessment of whether the situation has changed. You've also got a way to scope success, which I think is really interesting. Can you talk about that a little?

Yeah. When you're setting success in a growth strategy, finish lines matter. Growth strategies need a finish line. Those finish lines can be destinations, those finish lines can be directions. But as a leader, your most important goal is not setting the goals. Your most important role is not setting the goal, it's setting the boundaries. Is that we think, oh, our job is to give these big pushing goals to the team. Your real job is to give them the boundaries. What are those non negotiables, the parameters they cannot cross as they're running towards that finish line. Is what we often do as leaders to teams of five people to 500,000 is we give our team goals that conflict. We say we want to make 100 million in revenue at 20% profit and have the highest level of customer satisfaction and employee engagement. There's trade offs in meeting those goals. Right? And you need to tell me how I'm supposed to manage those trade offs. Because if you don't tell me how to manage those trade offs, I have to guess. And sometimes I guess, but more often I stop and I ask for help or I ask for guidance. And we wonder why strategy execution is looking slow. We blame process. Our hierarchy, our bureaucracy. Scott, most of the time it's lack of clarity. I cannot say this enough. The majority of times, strategy execution slows. Do not blame bureaucracy. Blame lack of clarity. We have not been clear about what the finish line is and what are those boundaries that we need to stay within now. Boundaries are not constraints. We often think boundaries. Oh, constraints, like you're limiting my growth. The weird paradox about growth strategy is boundaries give folks freedom. When you tell Your team. Here are your boundaries, which could be about cash or margin or profitability, minimum customer retention rate. If you're in any hard industry like construction, it could be safety and financially, it could be risk. Those are all typical boundaries. Once you give me my boundaries, I'm now empowered. I now have freedom to move within those boundaries as I execute towards that goal. So again, as a leader, your job is not just the goal. Your more critical job is goals do not conflict. And I've called up the boundaries so folks can make trade offs as they're running towards that goal. And you didn't ask, but as we mentioned, some other frameworks that I think should retire. Bhags are another one. And I get it. I know that Bhags are super sexy and we all love them. And I work with clients who still use them. Right. Empirically, they don't work. I like to use stuff that works. And empirically, bhags do not work. And I'll tell you why. Because when you give us. Define apologies. BHAG stands for big carry, audacious goal. Again, super sexy word, fun to say does not work in practice. And the reason it doesn't work in practice is when you give your team a bhag. The definition of a bhag is this isn't actually possible. And the notion is, oh, we'll just shoot for the moon and like, even if you miss, you land among the stars. Very poetic saying, very unhelpful inside a corporate environment, right? Because if I know this BHAG is impossible, I recalibrate. You tell me what the goal is and I say, I know. Scott knows that'll never happen, so maybe he really meant this. But someone else recalibrates in a different way and a third person recalibrates in a different way. So rather than inspiring and motivating the team, we now all have different goals because we have reinterpreted and calibrated your bhag in different ways that match our understanding of the situation, which creates misalignment. So now I'm making decisions that aren't aligned with my colleagues decisions because we're actually moving towards a different finish line. Look, that finish line should be aggressive. It should be pushing. If not, don't call it a strategy. But the math eventually has to work. We need to build enough belief that's not based on faith, right? Belief based on practical execution. We can reach it. That's when you get the alignment and the motivation you want with the Bhag. Clarity is the ultimate motivator. That's what your main goal is.

There are so many good sound bites in that and very aligned on clarity. And I can tell you from engineering systems that have to align to a bhag it ends up being just like a box you're putting in front of everything else so that you have it. But what we found and this is hundreds of sessions where I've sat with people working through we can name the goal methodologies. It just creates friction. It creates a lot of friction. And I really respect and draw a lot from Jim Collins work.

Absolutely. He wrote the manual on a lot of the growth strategy. But you also need to empirically let stuff prove out. Now there is an exception. The Mark Benioff at Salesforce is the only person empirically and please feedback if others who has consistently so more than once used BHAGs and they worked. I haven't met team members, senior team members in another organization that's used them consistently and they work. So I've got one. Yeah.

So he, I know he uses he calls it V2 mom. So it's which result map supports although nobody's actually using that one.

Yeah.

Out of all the all the frames frameworks we have now vision values, methods, object obstacles and measures and I might have gotten methods and measures but so they have the vision is it sounds like a bhag then there's all this other work to reduce it. I think that when you're in an when you're in a unicorn market by and I always think of unicorns as market driven more than they are company driven. So there's a massive market, there's a massive rise. The rules are a little different. The way Google sets goals, they're just, they've already caught the wave and it's a massive wave and they just need to stay on the board and not catch a rail. For any of my surfing friends, it's very different from the companies that are paddling their behinds off just trying to catch a wave that's much smaller. So in those cases maybe you don't need as much clarity and I'm not advocating for not having clarity but these are often once in a decade type.

Markets and your beliefs would help you understand that. This is a great example of if you are in one of these unicorn environments, especially where there's a possible land grab and a land grab is where there's going to be network effects, not just scale effects, but network effects or you can control distribution channels then growth at all costs. What Reid Hoffman calls blitzscaling might be something that you'd want to pursue. And that's slightly different. Right. And again, the book. Blitzscaling wrote the book on exactly that. The difficulty is very few markets actually necessitate a land grab. Right. We often confuse scale effects with network effects. Scale effects being able to serve more customers or users effectively. Great. Network effects is different than scale effects. Network effects means your customers or consumers get more value, usually an order of magnitude more value as the number of other users using that solution increases as well. And we get excited about markets where we see scale effects and assume it's going to be winner take all. But winner take all is applicable in network effects, much more so than scale effects.

That is a very clear and useful way to look at it. I like that a lot. I don't know that I've used that mental model before the two and that's one that I think everybody ought to add to their catalog of mental models. Their lattice work. As Charlie Munger puts it. What are the things that you're seeing come up most now since you've written the book and published this? Because this all started as a memo to your clients when Covid hit where you said hey team, it's time put on big boy the big girl pants. And now is the time when great companies grow and and the stories around that were amazing. And so here comes the book.

Yeah.

Now you've been talking in a lot of much more enterprise Y circles. I would say large companies.

Yeah.

That they do strategy themselves. They're having to. We're all having to deal with a very rapidly changing landscape now. Thing changed and how you think about this.

I think it's look the stuff in survivories that thrive have been doing for over 15 years. Covid was a really crystallizing moment. To package it in a way that made sense is during COVID and this is one of those origin stories that's true and a lot of origin stories are not true. During those Couple weeks in March 2020 after Covid I was having conversation after conversation with folks CEOs who and I'm sure Scott, you had many similar conversations. The it always started the same way. Why me? Why now? Everything was going so great. We finally had this strategy in place. Like this isn't fair. Right. And you get this insight. You say you can't wear the badge of an entrepreneur if you can't grow your company in this kind of market too. Right. If you can just grow your company in a frothy market which we had in the years leading up to that then don't wear the Badge call yourself an entrepreneur when you can grow in all of the different times is that we really struggle because we have tons of guidance on how to grow a company. But a lot of it's very market dependent. It says, hey, do this in stable markets, do this in a recession, do this in that market. And the realization I've had talking about it was, is this, why are we letting the market tell us when it's a good time to grow? I don't want to do that again. Most frameworks let the market tell you when it's a good time to grow. When it's a downturn, you put the recession playbook in. When it's a frothy market, you put this one. I decided I don't want to do that. I want to let my growth strategy tell me when it's a good time to grow. And more than that, I want every time to be a good time to grow. So I'm willing to change and adapt, to seize the opportunities and downturns, to seize the opportunities and uncertainty, and to seize the opportunities in frothy markets. But if you want to do this right, you decide when it's a great time to grow, not the market. But that does not mean being delusional. Some folks interpret downturns are great or uncertainty is great to what I've called the I've got this approach, I've got a strategy, I've got a plan, I just need to do it. That's not what I mean at all. You can make any time a great time to grow, but you have to be willing to change. You need to check your ego at the door that you've learned everything you can, that you know everything you can and that plan is right. Need to approach every moment with the assumption I might need to adjust, I might need to change, and critically, I have to learn the learning velocity I always knew was critical. There's a reason it's the number one differentiator that has proven out so powerfully in the last five years that I am not changing my view on it. Scott. I am doubling, if not tripling down on the criticality of learning velocity to leading growth journeys, especially through uncertainty.

That might end up being our mic drop moment. But I will say one thing I'm reminded of as we talk about this. We think when I, when people talk to me about strategy, it's like word soup. I get a lot of jargon thrown at me. There's a lot of I got my mba, I did all these things. What is always crystal clear to me when we speak. I just know this because of how we met. Yes. You've taken in all the academic information, but you've done a ton of research and then you've gone and practiced.

Yes.

And learned with your clients. So for anybody that's thinking, oh, strategy, I think I really feel like you've written a book on it.

It's a practical book. Right. One an early version of the book was read and feedback that I got was, this is a bit weird because I can hear you talking to me when I read it. Right. It's a bit too practical. And I said, great. That's exactly what I was trying to do is I have read pretty much everything out there. I have to by the nature of my job. But you don't have time to do that if you're running a company or running a team. My job is to take all of the gems out there, all the grounded theoretical research, but also close to two decades of doing it every day and saying, let me give it to you in this end to end playbook, which is not a recession playbook. It's not a stability playbook. It's not just an uncertainty playbook, it's a growth playbook. It will remain robust regardless of the market circumstances.

The last thing, one thing I do want to hit on that I'm just realizing we didn't. I still like this idea of saying, if this is where we want to go and this is where our finish line is, what are the battles we have to win?

Yes.

How's that working? Are people leaning into this idea of must win battles? First, tell us a little bit about it, how that breaks. Because everybody's very accustomed to objectives and key results. We set our rocks. We're going to manage project portfolios and all the yada. I like this very clear way of thinking about things.

I'm a rather blunt person when it matters, and it matters when you're trying to grow. That you're clear is doing what I do and working across multiple languages. You become very conscious of how words translate. Right. And the funny thing that we've done in organizations is we have more than 15 words that translate in the English dictionary to most important thing. Goals, objectives, targets, AIMs, KPIs, OKRs, rocks. I could keep going if you look them up. If I'm a non native speaker, they all mean Scott, most important thing. So if I'm in an organization with all of those terms, what am I actually supposed to be working on? And that is the power of must wins. Hold you in the name. Everything else is a nice to have. These are the most critical things we must win over the midterm to get to that definition of success. Now some clients call them must wins versus must win battles. I'm agnostic to that and frankly I'm agnostic what you call them as long as you execute them. I have one very firm rule. Whatever term you pick must have integrity. So if you don't like the term must win battles and you want to use strategic priorities, cool. But the word priority is now locked. It cannot be applied to any other thing in the organization but the top four or five growth priorities over the midterm. So pick whatever word you want and then fall in love because that word is locked for just those midterm priorities. And you're not going to change it over the cycle of strategy. You might change the priorities in it, but you're not going to change the title of what you're calling those priorities.