What is Strategy? – A Presentation

This week I spoke twice at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, CA – 30 minutes east of San Francisco. I whipped together an hour long presentation for the students in a Strategy course in the Business school to answer the question: What is Strategy?

It was great to force myself to present some of my ideas – several of which were only half baked – and to get so much positive feedback and concrete recommendations for changes.

I haven’t had a chance to incorporate feedback into the deck yet so I just decided to publish it for you as-is. I plan to tweak things and give this talk again soon though.


One big note: I designed this deck to be presented by me so it’s not 100% ready for consumption without me. You’ll get the gist though.

I reference my piece last week about Puddles Pity Party and my research on Moneyball (the 2002 Oakland A’s season) – only some of which I’ve published so far. Check out those posts if you haven’t had a chance yet.

The students were excited that I was taking back the word “strategy” – not just using it sloppily like many of their course readings. They expressed a lot of interest in the etymologies that I shared too, which is surprising given how boring that sounds.

And, they really appreciated that I actually defined the word strategy.

What is Strategy?

Strategy is the process of creating a set of well-aligned activities with the aim of occupying a valuable position in a competitive landscape.

I really emphasized that strategy is a process, not a static outcome.

In case you missed some of my posts from the past few days, here they are:

PS: This is just for you.

PPS: If you’re not familiar with the trivium (slide 3), you’re missing out. I might write about it more next week.