As the strategy definition process for next year begins, and as a current student in the Stanford LEAD program, I find myself reflecting on lessons from Professors William Barnett and Jesper Sørensen in their Strategic Leadership course. One simple definition has stayed with me: strategy is the logic that explains why we might win.
This definition took me a while to internalize. For much of my career, the strategy we received looked more like a to-do list: cut costs by 10%, invest more in marketing, grow market share by 10%, add 10 new team members, and close 100 projects by year-end. We were told the what, but rarely the why. When people on the execution side receive only a list of actions, they are forced to connect the dots themselves—and that makes it far more likely they will take steps we never intended.
A winning strategy does something different. It lays out the logic of how a company will create and capture value. At its core sits a coherent argument—an expression of how we believe the world works. As leaders, our job is to share that logic clearly with the team. When we explain the bigger story and show how the pieces fit together, we connect the dots for them. If we don’t, people fill the gaps with their own assumptions about why they are doing the work, and those assumptions can easily pull them in directions we never intended. The logic must be specific enough to guide real action.
We should approach strategy the way scientists do: form hypotheses about how the world operates, run experiments, gather data, and use the evidence to refine our understanding. It is a continuous cycle. Strategy is never static; it remains fluid and requires us to look back, make sense of what worked, and keep improving.