“Bad strategy isn’t the absence of strategy, but an approach to work that contains contradictions, fails to address the challenges at hand, or tries to be all things to all people.”
— Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
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If we want to accelerate the growth of a company, we must separate two things that are often confused : planning and strategy .
Planning is about learning, not being right.
Strategy, on the other hand, means choosing how to win, where to focus limited energy, and what evidence we will use to correct course, faster than our competitors can.
In this newsletter, I share five practical drivers I use in collaborations with leaders and teams. They’re simple to understand, challenging to apply .
When systematized with MAKE PROGRESS®, they become the most solid way to move from idea to results without wasting time and motivation .
1) Separate “business as usual” from innovation
Current management and innovation do not have the same metabolism.
The first thrives on stability, efficiency, and reduced variability.
The second requires exploration, rapid testing, tolerance for error, and short learning cycles. Mixing the two environments produces a paradox: routine stifles novelty, novelty destabilizes routine. I discussed this in Note 221 .
The result is a tired company, always busy but rarely making progress .
The first step is to separate.
In business as usual , standards, roles, operational metrics, and clear cadences are defined. These are what we call Systems at MAKE PROGRESS. Here’s an in-depth look at them, along with 10 KPIs to measure them.
Innovation requires investments in small but dedicated budgets and timeframes, with explicit timeframes and scale criteria.
Here MAKE PROGRESS® helps with canvases and rituals that avoid religious wars between those who produce today and those who build tomorrow .
A question for you: in the current way of working, are we just executing or are we learning along the way how our customers and non-customers are evolving?
2) Don’t confuse schizophrenia with agility
Agility isn’t about running in all directions. It’s about choosing, learning, and focusing .
I see managers full of open initiatives, few closed ones, and little impact. It’s the “let’s go and see” syndrome confused with non-scientific experimentation. The energy of the launch is often confused with the value created.
Strategic agility starts with clear assumptions: who are we playing for, what problem are we solving, what mechanism makes us difficult to imitate, what signals will measure progress.
In practice, every initiative should be born with three written and shared elements:
- the advantage hypothesis,
- the success and stop criteria,
- the testing time window.
Then you need the courage to say no, to close, to refocus. Agility is a training ground for sacrifice.
With MAKE PROGRESS®, I’ve started using a “choice log” that makes strategic noes visible. The team discovers that eliminating friction frees up more speed than multiplying projects.
A question for you: Which ongoing initiatives lack a clear stopping criterion and are wasting energy with no prospect of impact?
3) Build the Progress Loop
Every strategy flows in a continuous cycle: learning → inventing → choosing → planning → executing → learning again…
We call it the Progress Loop . It’s the minimal form of a strategic operating system. If just one of the loops fails, the company enters survival mode , where everything seems vital because opinions drive every decision.
In practice the loop only works if the rhythms are clear.
- Learning: learning, through analyzing what worked and what didn’t.
- Generate new ideas: From what we’ve learned, list 1–3 hypotheses to test.
- Plan: Choose what to try in the next cycle, defining a guiding metric and a few supporting metrics, setting stopping criteria and a deadline.
- Execute: Make the next move each week and update the evidence.
We always track your choices updates so you can’t change the story later. Read this sentence carefully again, it’s important.
If you want to learn more, I invite you to read Enter the execution mode . MAKE PROGRESS® brings concrete tools into the loop: calibrated OKRs, thematic all-hands , 30-minute focus reviews, decision backlogs, and checklists for transferring innovation to the core business .
There is only one meaning: to close the cycle .
Each round must yield verified learning and consequent action. Only in this way does the team understand that the strategy is not a document, but a workflow that reduces entropy.
A question for you: how many meetings end without really changing the way you work?
4) Get the best tools for a new execution engine
Ideas don’t just come into being on their own. Tools are what transform intention into repeatable behavior.
In MAKE PROGRESS® I have built the most comprehensive set I know to guide strategic execution: from crystallization of emerging strategy, to measurement, from evolution to accelerated execution .
It means going from “we know what to do” to “every week we make the next move.”
Every tool has a purpose: to reduce ambiguity, to align, to accelerate, to measure without confusion.
The principle is simple: less cognitive friction, more space for work that creates value.
When a tool is clear, discussions become productive and time is freed up. When a tool is absent, people fill the void with interpretations and routines.
A question for you: do you have a single, prioritized backlog for initiatives and tests, or does the work happen in scattered files and chats?
5) Talk with numbers
Numbers aren’t a moral judgment; they’re a language that helps us see similarities, differences, and weak signals . Metrics don’t replace thought; they guide it. This is why I recommend always working on three levels:
- Product Core Metrics
- North Star Metric
- Profi Core Metrics
Product Core Metrics describe the adoption and quality of use, breadth, depth, and frequency of products in the market.
The North Star Metric is a concise measure of the impact we generate for clients in relation to our strategy. It must be understandable to everyone, difficult to manipulate, and connected to value creation.
Profit Core Metrics describe economic sustainability, unit economics, margins, returns on capital, and payback periods.
They influence each other in this exact sequence.
Used together, these metrics enable two valuable things. First,
With MAKE PROGRESS®, we build essential dashboards and ten-minute weekly reading routines that turn numbers into decisions, not endless discussions.
A question for you: What is your North Star Metric today, and which two product and profit metrics describe your model?
What to do now
- Draw the line between business as usual and innovation.
- Clean up your initiative portfolio. Decisively close down anything that doesn’t have stopping criteria and expected impact.
- Establish your Progress Loop with clear cadences and a short weekly retrospective.
- Introduce the KPI Book to track the most important metrics.
- Define the North Star Metric and connect two Product Core Metrics and two Profit Core Metrics that describe your operating model.
If you’d like to work on these five drivers in your organization, visit this page and request a concrete job proposal that respects your team’s timelines, constraints, and priorities.
