The Discipline of Choosing
- Jun 15
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 16
I've been revisiting The Discipline of Market Leaders recently, and one idea keeps resurfacing.
The word strategy has become so obscure that it's often difficult to know what people mean when they use it.
Ask ten leaders to define strategy and you'll likely get ten different answers.
I've come to use a much simpler definition:
Strategy is what we say yes to—and what we say no to.
The more strategic planning sessions I participate in, the more convinced I am that most organizations don't struggle because they lack ideas.
They struggle because they haven't made a choice.
The leadership team wants exceptional customer service...
and innovative products,
and industry-leading efficiency,
and custom solutions,
and low costs,
and premium quality.
Who wouldn't?
The goal of strategy is not to decide what you'll do. It's to decide what you'll stop doing.
As Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema write:
"What's needed in response to the new competition is focus and discipline."
Their model proposes three value disciplines:
Operational Excellence
Product Leadership
Customer Intimacy
Organizations must be competent in all three, but they cannot lead in all three.
"You can't hope to be the best in all dimensions."
Yet this is where many strategic planning efforts stall.
Teams identify priorities, initiatives, and goals, but rarely make the difficult choices that will differentiate them from competitors.
A Customer Intimate organization may sacrifice standardization in favor of flexibility.
An Operationally Excellent organization may standardize aggressively to reduce cost and increase consistency.
Both approaches can win—but they require different choices.
The result is a strategy that sounds flawless but isn't supported by the tradeoffs required to make it real.
Every strategy creates constraints. Those constraints are not weaknesses; they are the price of differentiation.
The uncomfortable truth is that every strategic advantage comes with a corresponding sacrifice.
Strategic planning creates energy... and usually a long list of initiatives.
But within weeks, the excitement fades because nothing changed about how decisions were made, resources were allocated, or priorities were chosen.
...and teams return to business as usual.
The organization becomes neither here nor there.
By attempting to be everything to everyone, organizations create the very confusion, tension, and loss of energy the authors warn about.
What I appreciate most about the three disciplines is not the model itself.
It's the discipline of choosing.
Each path requires a different operating model, investments, and decisions.
The strategy isn't the golden one-liner.
The strategy is the tradeoff.
Every meaningful strategy leaves good ideas on the cutting room floor.
That's why this idea continues to resonate with me.
"Choosing a discipline is the choice of winners."
Not because the model is perfect.
But because it forces the conversation most organizations try to avoid.
If your leadership team had to choose one discipline tomorrow, which would it be?
More importantly:
What would you have the courage to stop doing?