I can't remember where exactly I read it, but it stuck with me. "In business, strategy is what you are doing that your competitors aren't doing." This struck me

I can't remember where exactly I read it, but it stuck with me. "In business, strategy is what you are doing that your competitors aren't doing." This struck me as a pretty good and succinct definition. If you are just doing what your competitors are doing, you have no strategy, which is about right. For example, Netflix's strategy in its early days against Blockbuster (well documented in the book "7 Powers") was to not charge for late fees and to have awesome web-based movie recommendations. These were two key things they were doing that Blockbuster (and every other DVD rental store) wasn't doing. The "no late fees" thing is a particularly awesome strategy since it "counter-positioned" against Blockbuster's main profit center. Eventually, Blockbuster copied this strategy, but by then, it was too late, and, Netflix had shifted its own strategy toward, "Build the website from which everyone streams movies, remove the need to physically mail or pick up DVDs altogether." Even today, that strategy has been copied (Hulu, HBOMax, etc.) so their new strategy is, "Develop original Netflix movies/shows and the best overall catalog of movies/shows of licensed content, and have ubiquitous apps that work the same exact way on every device." As you can see, all of these are strategies... and they are likely ones that opinionated executives like Reed Hastings had a say in. I'm sure many tasks, goals, and so forth for many different teams within Netflix fell out of these strategies at different times. When a company is missing a strategy, they need opinionated and empowered leadership to shift strategy, sometimes painfully. But, that's not usually easy, especially when the company is historically successful on an old strategy, one which is no longer sound. When Netflix shifted from DVDs to streaming, it meant a lot of layoffs, and I'm sure many long-time professional relationships were soured by the experience. It's also very hard for individual contributors in a large company to shift the company's strategy. But it's not impossible. Arguably this was the original thinking behind Google "20% time". A project like GMail shifted Google's strategy, but it came out of experimentation by engineers. Easier said than done, though.