The (first) one on a strategy omnibus
A free-for-all
Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Now accepting keynotes for 25Q3-25Q4
The 2025 lineup:
What to do when you don’t know what to do.
How to create a sustainable competitive advantage through superior adaptability. (Based on the new book by the same name.)
Succeed big, fail small.
How to use experimentation to drive efficiency and effectiveness of innovation at scale.
Managing uncertainty.
How to steer an organization through a sea of change.
Retail 3.0.
How to build a profitable retail business in the modern marketplace. (Based on the 2026 follow-up to the 2022 smash hit white paper The Gravity of e-Commerce.)
If you want to book me for your event, corporate speaking slot, or workshop, merely send me an email. To make sure I am available, please do so at your earliest convenience; my availability is limited and the schedule tends to fill up fast. More information may be found here.
The TL;DR
My work on a fourth kind of uncertainty will continue; I firmly believe that the current theories are insufficient and therefore consider it important to add to the debate. However, for the time being, I will leave it for the book.
Strategy is one of the big words in the corporate language, yet few who utter it seem to agree on what it actually means.
The traditional grouping of four main definitions should be extended to include at least two new ones (with adaptive strategy as a potential third).
Given the theoretical and practical variance, we are going to dedicate the next few weeks and months to build a strategy omnibus equivalent to an MBA course in shrunken format. Premium subscribers will be given an exclusive .pdf containing all that discussed and more upon completion.
Personal updates before we go-go
A very quick couple of points today since we have a lot to go through:
For those attending or watching Nudgestock from home, see you soon. I will be talking about the power of not knowing what to do.
The teething has made the youngest take her fell beast scream to entirely new levels. The wife, the eldest, and I, are going deaf. As is every neighbor within a 15-mile radius.
On the plus side, she has started giving me applause whenever I change her diaper. I do not know whether she is being sarcastic, mind.
As we are nearing completion of the book (about 90% there), I have already decided what my next one will be about. It will be a lot faster to write, but no less impactful.
Moving on to the markets.
This is a free version of Strategy in Praxis. All that follows below is otherwise reserved for premium subscribers. To unlock 300% more content and an e-book, upgrade your subscription today.
The market vitals
President Taco is still going about his tariffs with the kind of on-and-off treatment usually reserved for sitcom relationships. By now, we have seen enough of his episodes to know the story.
AI is currently being hailed as a “time saver”. It is a tale as old as technology; with almost each new invention comes promises of hours freed up. What is often forgotten is that even if the promises are fulfilled, the created gap is quickly closed. It follows from the law of stretched systems (which we have discussed at length before): any improvement will be exploited to achieve a new intensity and tempo of activity.
Speaking of AI and the law of stretched systems, Meta recently signed a 20-year deal to buy nuclear power for its data centers. Analysts have taken this to mean two things:
The move is a sign that the “AI boom” is in its early innings. This is a conclusion I would be careful not to rely too heavily on if for no other reason than the fact that Meta hardly is representative of AI companies in general. Few can afford a $72B related capex, for example, nor necessarily make the same kind of long-term commitments.
Meta is now “set” for the future in terms of power supply. This again ignores the law of stretched systems. Sooner rather than later, the power plant/grid will be used to capacity.
The most obvious conclusion to me is that the deal is good news for Nvidia.
It is, shall we say, entertaining to watch the escalating war of words between Trump and Musk. The two men (and I use the term loosely) have spent much of the past 48 hours publicly going back and forth in the aftermath of what one can only assume must have been a bad breakup.
The implications, though, are interesting. Musk has been an enabler of Trump. If he turns against The Orange One, he has a platform with which to be a massive thorn in the president’s side. Meanwhile, Trump has the power (or at least the will) to mess with Tesla through specific tariffs.
The short-term impact on their respective businesses has been negative. Trump Media & Technology Group stock fell 8% on the day, while Tesla was down 14.3%. It will be interesting to see what a stronger anti-Trump stance might do for the Tesla sales in Europe though.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is set to release its latest job report today. While inflation perhaps is more important, the data could be worth paying attention to as it might represent a stress test of the labor market amid the tariff chaos.
Moving on.
The strategy omnibus
A long MBA course in a short format
Over the last month and a bit, as uncertainty has kept reaching ever-rising new highs (or so the narrative goes), we have tried to break the topic down into pragmatic detail. We have shown that exploration of the unknown is instrumental, how that exploration is best done through experimentation, and how that experimentation is best done through safe-to-fail actions in parallel.
To be honest, though, I do not feel that I am entirely done with the topic. For one, I must keep working on the concept of dynamic uncertainty. The reason is twofold:
It represents a (genuinely) new understanding of uncertainty.
It represents the kind of uncertainty that, I would argue, is of the largest practical importance to firms.
Do not get me wrong, radical uncertainty is an excellent step forward. But it is also one that is, or so I would argue, incomplete (or at least unsatisfactory).
On one hand, John Kay and Mervyn King include events that may be defined as genuine black swans – occurrences presumed impossible and therefore left unconsidered in prevailing mental models. Such events of ontological novelty cannot be deduced or predicted even in principle; it is for this reason that the uncertainty is, as it were, radical.
On the other hand, the duo also includes events that are possible to anticipate, albeit impossible to predict in precise detail. Contrary to popular belief, neither the 2008 financial crisis nor the Covid pandemic, for instance, were genuine black swans. Both financial crises and pandemics have taken place many times before, and so were likely to reoccur at some point.
The inclusion of events that are both a) outside of one’s realm of imagination, and b) firmly within, makes the concept of radical uncertainty so large as to be unwieldy. It also ignores the fact that decision-making processes differ completely depending on which of the two one is facing. That which is possible to anticipate is potentially possible to mitigate, and even in rare instances eliminate. That which is impossible to anticipate can, per definition, neither be mitigated nor eliminated.
I digress.
Further investigations will be left, at least for the time being, to the book. Today, as promised last week, we will instead begin our new theme: what I have decided to (altogether too grandiosely) call “the strategy omnibus”.
As we all know, strategy is one of the big words in the business vernacular and usually uttered with a rather large dose of apparent import. But while most everyone agrees that firms should have one, few agree on what that actually translates to. Strategy has become a chewing gum term: people keep it long in their mouth, and can stretch it to mean almost anything.
The situation is pretty much the same in the academic doctrine. Theorists use the term seemingly under the belief that everyone else shares their interpretation, or by keeping it so vague that the reader can imbue it with their own definition. “Be more strategic” is the business world equivalent of “Make America great again”.
Having said that, upon completion of my meta-analysis of more serious texts, I was still able to identify four main strands of thinking (confirming what was established by Henry Mintzberg in the mid-1980s):
A strategy is a plan; a "how”; a means of getting from here to there.
A strategy is a pattern in actions taken over time.
A strategy is a position that reflects decisions to offer particular products or services in particular markets.
A strategy is a high level vision, perspective and/or direction.
Much like religions, each school of strategic management thought comes with its own evangelists and belief that it, and only it, represents the final truth. It is to be expected, of course. Not only are the four definitions different, but so different as to practically be each other’s counterparts. A plan is the result of direct control and deliberateness, whereas a revealed pattern is the outcome of indirect control and emergence. A position is where one is, while a direction is indicative of where one wants to be (and therefore per definition cannot be).
In addition to the aforementioned four, I would argue that there are another two ideologies that ought to be included given their undeniable practical popularity:
A strategy is a tool with which to solve problems.
A strategy is a set of choices made, and subsequently supported, to win in the marketplace.
Notably, although resting on similar deterministic assumptions, these two are also somewhat contradictory. A solution implies that no real choice needs to be made. A set of choices implies that there is not one identifiable solution (nor even necessarily a problem).
Each of the six dominant interpretations are, in other words, at best different and at worst mutually exclusive. This presents a glaring issue. When a supposed management guru, expert analyst, or praised columnist, asserts that one company’s strategy is superior or inferior to that of another, what exactly do they mean – and how do they know that the firms in question apply the same interpretation? How do they know that your company does? On a similar note, how can executives be certain that their employees share the same view of strategy as them? How can consultants establish that their clients use the terms as they do? And how does adaptive strategy, which is arguably the school of thought with the biggest potential of all to date, fit in?
The strategy omnibus will be designed to answer these questions and more.
Its creation will begin with a practical breakdown of each approach so that, if nothing else, we may establish what they bring to the table - in positive as well as negative terms. Inevitably, this will mean that we cover both what one might sloppily call big brand strategy and startup strategy, respectively. Once the necessary knowledge-base has been established, we will take what we have learned and leverage it to build upon a framework designed to establish executive beliefs about strategy.
All in all, then, we should end up with a wider understanding of theory as well as practice in general, and a potential method with which we may put our own firms’ behaviors in a relevant context. Or to put it differently, what one might expect to find in MBA courses - plus all that which comes from a more in-depth understanding of adaptive strategy, complex systems, and uncertainty.
Upon “completion”, I will then summarize all that has gone into the strategy omnibus in an easy-to-navigate .pdf for all premium subscribers to download.
Quite an undertaking, yes, but one that I am very excited about - and hope that you are too.
Next week, we will begin.
Until then, have the loveliest of weekends.
Onwards and ever upwards,
JP
Great stuff as always, and sympathies on the teething! We found that cucumbers cut into sticks and frozen were a winner for ours.