Your Strategy Deck Is a Budget With Nice Fonts

Now go through it slide by slide and ask one simple question of each initiative: is this something we would be doing anyway just to stay in business?

In our experience, the answer for most slides will be yes.

That is not a strategy deck. That is a budget with nice fonts and jazzy graphics.

This is not a niche problem. It is endemic across industries, company sizes and geographies, and it matters enormously, because when leadership teams think they are doing strategy, they stop asking the harder questions.

The organisation gets the comfort of a strategy process without the discipline of actual strategic thinking.

And that gap, between the appearance of strategy and the substance of it, is where companies lose their competitive advantage.

What Strategy Actually Means (And What It Doesn’t)

Let me be precise about what I mean, because the distinction I am drawing is not semantic.

In 1996, Michael Porter published what remains a seminal piece of management thinking, “What Is Strategy?” in the Harvard Business Review. Porter’s central argument was that operational effectiveness, doing the same things better than your rivals, is emphatically not strategy. It is necessary, but it is not sufficient, and confusing the two is dangerous.

Porter watched entire industries, particularly Japanese manufacturers in the 1990s, mistake operational excellence for strategy. The result was an arms race of improvement that ultimately compressed margins across the board, because if everyone is getting better at the same things, no one builds an advantage. They just raise the floor.

Strategy, Porter argued, is about performing different activities from rivals, or performing similar activities in deliberately different ways, in combinations that are hard to replicate. It involves trade-offs. It shuts off options. It is, at its core, a choice about where to compete and, crucially, where not to.

Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley sharpened this in their 2013 book “Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works.”

Strategy, in their formulation, comes down to two integrated questions: where will we play, and how will we win? Every other question in a strategy process, how we resource it, how we organise for it, what capabilities we need to build, flows from those two. If your strategy deck cannot answer those two questions with specificity and conviction, it is not a strategy.

The Strategy Test: Applying It Function by Function

Now apply that test to the functional plans that typically make up a strategy deck.

Sales Strategy

The plan usually shows volume growth targets, revenue uplift from pricing, and gross margin improvement. These are important. A commercial leader who cannot deliver them should not be in the role. But they are performance management disciplines, not strategic choices.

The volume target does not tell you which markets or segments you have chosen to win in, or why you have the right to win there. The margin improvement target does not tell you whether the pricing model itself is a source of competitive differentiation.

The strategic questions, which are almost never in the deck, are: which customers are we deliberately choosing to serve better than anyone else, what does that require us to do differently, and which customers or segments are we willing to walk away from as a consequence?

Operations and Supply Chain Strategy

The plan typically covers safety performance, quality improvement, service level targets, and cost reduction, often framed as efficiency gains that offset raw material inflation, labour cost increases, or compliance investment.

Again, a competent Operations function should be doing all of this continuously. It is table stakes. But it is not strategy. The strategic question is whether your supply chain architecture, your network design, your supplier relationships, your logistics model, constitutes a position that competitors cannot replicate quickly or cheaply. Amazon’s supply chain is strategic.

It was built through a series of deliberate, expensive, long-term choices that most competitors were unwilling or unable to make. Most companies’ supply chains are operational. They are well-run, but they are not a source of advantage.

HR, Digital, and Finance

The same logic applies in HR, where the plan tends to feature engagement scores, retention targets, capability uplift programs and DEI metrics. In Digital or Technology, it tends to feature platform modernisation, automation initiatives and data maturity improvements.

In Finance, it features process efficiency, reporting enhancement and working capital management. All legitimate. All important. None of it, as typically presented, is strategic.

The Dynamic Capabilities Objection, And Why It Doesn’t Change the Argument

There is one challenge to this argument that deserves a direct response, because it is a genuine one. Scholars in the dynamic capabilities tradition, particularly David Teece, Gary Pisano and Amy Shuen in their landmark “Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management” in the Strategic Management Journal, argue that the capacity to continuously improve, to sense and respond to change faster than rivals, can itself become a strategic capability.

Toyota is the example everyone reaches for. Decades of relentless operational discipline, embedded in the Toyota Production System, created an organisational capability that competitors genuinely struggled to replicate.

This is true. But it does not contradict the argument. What made Toyota’s approach strategic was not the individual safety target or the annual cost reduction goal. It was the deliberate architectural choice, made over decades, to build a learning organisation around a specific philosophy of continuous improvement, and to invest in that capability when rivals were not.

That is a strategic choice. The annual operational targets that flow from it are accountability. The distinction holds.

The One Question to Ask Before Your Next Board Presentation

So here is the test I would invite you to apply to your next strategy deck, before it goes to your leadership team or your board. For every initiative on every slide, ask: would a well-run competitor be doing this anyway, simply to remain competitive?

If the answer is yes, it belongs in your operational plan and your performance management framework. It is important. Hold people accountable for it. But do not dress it up as strategy.

If the answer is no, because it reflects a deliberate and differentiated choice about where to compete and how to win, a choice that involves real trade-offs and that a competitor would not automatically replicate, then you are in strategy territory.

In most decks I see, 80 to 90 per cent of the content fails that test. That should be a confronting finding. It should also be a liberating one, because it means the real strategic conversation has not yet happened. And that is exactly where the value is.

What’s Next: What Real Strategic Choices Look Like

Stay tuned for the next post where we will explore what genuine strategic choices actually look like inside each major function, and offer a practical tool you can use to run that diagnostic yourself.