The bloat has become the product. Long decks feel important. Dense slides feel expensive. Ambiguity gives everyone room to pretend alignment. It looks like work.

A useful strategy isn't pages of personality traits.
It's the thought that kills ten bad ones.
It's the thing that gives the work a spine.

Strategy Shouldn't Slow You Down

Strategy is meant to get you to better work, faster. If it's not helping the team make sharper decisions, it's not strategy. It's dressing. It's theatre. Somewhere along the way, the deck became the deliverable. Strategy didn't stop being necessary. It stopped being usable. We forgot its job is to bring clarity, not complexity.

Strategy Isn't a Personality Quiz

Brands don't need to be golden retrievers, or the lovechild of Danny DeVito and David Attenborough.
They don't need spirit animals or mythological backstories. That kind of thinking rarely survives the work.

Archetypes and metaphors are fine when they help shape a decision. When they become the work, you're not creating a strategy. You're just adding narrative to help a weak idea survive the meeting.

And that's the real problem. Strategy shouldn't exist to dress up average thinking. It shouldn't state the obvious. It should carve out something the brand didn't have before.

Strategy Isn't a Phase. It's a Filter.


You don't need 92 pages. You need a spine.
 Forget the framework. Strategy isn't something you present, approve, and shelve. It's a filter for what to say, how to say it, and what to leave out.

If the strategy's clear, everything sharpens. If it's vague, the whole thing turns to soup.