Lessons - Most People Confuse Tactics With Strategy. Here's the Difference. | Seth Godin - Author of This Is Strategy & 20+ Bestselling Books

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In this lessons episode, discover why strategy starts with defining who to become rather than following a proven playbook.

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Understand how focusing on a small group of customers can drive growth.

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Explore how deliberate choices make risks more manageable and uncover why creating a clear direction beats drifting through endless options.

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You know what my favorite thing about you is?

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My favorite thing about you is that you take a concept that people think they understand very well.

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And then you flip it on its head and you paint it in a whole other light and a whole other lens.

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And then people have to relearn this thing in the proper way, in the way that maybe they didn't see it in that light before.

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So I think it's really important to tee up this conversation with a very easy question, but a very important one, which would be, what is strategy?

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Let's set the benchmark.

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It's so easy to skip over, so easy to pretend that tactics are strategy or that doing our job is our strategy or that hope is our strategy.

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Strategy is a philosophy of becoming.

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It is being honest about who it's for and what it's for, the change we seek to make.

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It involves seeing the systems around us and choosing a path that's not unnecessarily difficult.

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that if you're already getting everything you want to get, you don't need a better strategy.

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But most people I know are not in that category.

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When you find an elegant strategy, when the wind is at your back, when you are building the networks that support you, everything gets easier.

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So why do people, because you speak a lot about strategy coming from the context of military and even command and control.

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And this is sort of like the strategy of yesteryear, the strategy of old.

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Yet I see it.

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I don't think people really have evolved what their interpretation of strategy is.

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So how do you see, when you even write work like this,

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There's obviously a reason why you chose to focus on it.

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What do you see in the market in 2024?

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And we'll keep it evergreen in 2025 until you write your next book.

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What do you see in the market to be the biggest issue with how people interpret what strategy is?

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Freedom.

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So in the 50s, Harvard Business School churned out people who made all the decisions, like the Fortune 500.

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Between them and the generals, they ran everything.

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The average person didn't need a strategy because the average person didn't have a lot of options.

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But now, the number of options we have, from which podcast we listen to, to what job we're going to do, to what software we're going to use to do that job, to which customers are we serving.

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This huge list of things we can choose from.

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And it's something, you know, if we think about something as benign, apparently, as personal finance.

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I'm in a parking lot a little while ago, and I hear this woman say to her friend, I just made my last car payment.

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I'm going to buy a new car next week.

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Well, that's not a good strategy for having money in the bank.

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That is somebody else's strategy seducing you into making a bad decision.

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Multiply that by all of the leverage we have now, all of the choices we have now.

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Either someone is going to do their strategy to you, or you're going to build your own strategy to help you get what you need.

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And when we think about, because the audience is filled with entrepreneurs, if you think about like a take to market strategy, we try and find product market fit and we try and find our first maybe 50 customers, we try and validate what we're building.

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What's right about that and what's wrong about that?

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Because the very normal definition of strategy that an entrepreneur asked me, what do I do to start this off?

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Okay, well that sounds great, but is that my strategy or am I playing into someone else's

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No, no, that actually has embodied in it a huge amount of insight, most of which comes from Steve Blank, which is your business, if you're starting a business, is for 50 people or 10 people.

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If you don't get traction from them, you should start over, make a better product.

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Most of the entrepreneurs I bump into don't understand it.

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They're like, I got to get the word out.

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Who can I hustle?

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I need to, my Kickstarter, if you would just put my Kickstarter on your blog, then everything would be fine.

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Well, that's lottery thinking.

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That says, what I'm working on is so hard and so important, everyone needs it.

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So I met Sergey Brin when Google was very young.

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And he said, at Google, we don't do any outreach, any promotion at all.

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So the reason is simple.

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Every day Google gets a little better.

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And so the longer it takes someone to discover Google, the better it'll be by the time they get there.

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And we're going to build this entire organization to please the 2,000 users we have right now.

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Because if we do that, they will tell the others.

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That's a strategy.

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That's a strategy that was impossible in 1966.

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And it is a strategy that is apparently obvious today, but a lot of people are still stuck with this mindset.

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You know, marketing has a lot of strategy in it when you do it right.

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And when you do it wrong, you're just constantly bothering people.

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I see how all the thoughts and the themes and the ideas you have start to merge together because now you have your thousand true fans.

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And now you have.

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So now this all blends together.

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When you think you mentioned something that was interesting, the strategy is a philosophy of becoming.

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I find that line very unique.

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Can you explain that just a little bit what that means?

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Yeah.

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You know, when I graduated from business school, all I wanted was a job.

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And I realized that if I just went out to get a job, I was going to be a pawn in the system.

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So I had to think about who did I want to become.

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And once I knew who I wanted to become, then which job I took would become more clear.

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And my strategy was get a job, any job, in the fastest growing company you can find.

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because a fast-growing company is going to expose me to more deal flow, more opportunity, and more responsibility.

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So by the time I'm done with that job, I will be in a different place than if I had just gotten a job paying 10 times as much at a commercial bank processing payment.

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Well, most of my classmates did not have a strategy.

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I lucked into it.

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It just happened that I realized I needed one because I had too many choices.

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So again, we keep coming back to this philosophy that says, I'm not a dandelion getting blown around on the wind.

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I actually want to get over there.

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Let's figure out how to do that.

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I might be wrong, but at least I'll have a point of view.

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And you feel that, I mean, I've interviewed tons of entrepreneurs, but you've been doing this a lot longer than me.

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And you feel that people just, it's not just entrepreneurs, it's in their personal life, their professional life.

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You feel that there's a lot of aimlessness, a lot of meandering without purpose.

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Well, not because we're weak, because we've been indoctrinated.

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From the time we're in first grade at school, they never ask you a question they don't know the answer to.

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And all of the feedback is, did you comply?

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Did you conform?

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Did you meet the standard?

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And then after 20 years of that, they put us out in the world and say, you pick.

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But they never gave us any practice in picking.

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So it's no surprise, even in Silicon Valley, where I used to live, even at Flatiron, where I used to be an honorary venture partner,

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Apparently at the top ranks, everyone's waiting for a playbook.

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At Techstars, the people who go through that incubator memorize their pitch.

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And they always rhyme and they're exactly structured.

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Because it's easier to take one off the shelf than to think deeply about why you're even there.

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So then the people that are entrepreneurial, those are the people that, whether or not they do it intuitively or they seek it out, kind of like you mentioned, these are the people that define their own strategy.

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Now you mentioned actually, you can comment on that if that's interesting, the mindset of somebody who builds and takes risk versus somebody who just wants an off-the-shelf playbook.

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But then I also want to understand

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what that person does intuitively or purposefully that allows them to craft something that can be successful, that can pull them outside of the assembly line?

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Well, you said a couple words that really jumped out at me.

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The first one is intuitive.

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An intuitive strategy cannot be improved because you're not talking about it.

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So a main reason I made this into a book and not a blog post is this invitation for people to talk about it.

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If you aren't talking honestly about your strategy with peers, it's never going to improve.

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And in terms of risk, I don't think entrepreneurs take risks.

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I think people who do what their boss says take risks.

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Because when you read about layoffs, they had 15,000, 25,000 people at a time losing their job who were very obedient.

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What entrepreneurs do is they balance and bracket the risk.

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So it doesn't feel risky because the parts that are up to them are in their control, that they have a portfolio approach.

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So when I was a book packager, I pitched a book a week and made a book a month.

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And almost all the books I pitched got rejected.

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But I knew that the cost of getting rejected was tiny.

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It cost me $5 in stamps compared to the upside of when I got one that worked.

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I don't think that's risky.

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I think it's riskier to say to the boss, what do you want to do today?

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We didn't get any sales.

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Thanks for tuning in.

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