Can You Explain Your Strategy in 35 Words?
If you can’ state it, your team can’t execute it.
Here’s a simple test. Right now, can you summarize your company’s strategy in 35 words or less?
If you paused, you’re not alone. As a Harvard Business Review article famously pointed out, it’s a “dirty little secret” that most executives can’t do it. But this isn’t a failure of memory; it’s a failure of clarity. And it’s one of the most destructive, yet hidden, problems in business.
When Strategy Isn’t Clear, Nothing Is
An unclear strategy doesn’t just live in a PowerPoint deck. It cascades through the entire organization, creating confusion, wasted effort, and internal friction.
- Engineers build product features that customers don’t actually want.
- Marketers create campaigns with conflicting messages.
- Sales teams chase opportunities that don’t align with the company’s core strengths.
- Employees make thousands of small, daily decisions without a guiding principle to align them.
As the HBR article notes, a company without a clear strategy is like a pile of 10,000 iron filings pointing in every direction. A well-understood strategy acts like a magnet, aligning every single employee so their individual efforts reinforce one another, making the entire organization exponentially more effective.
The Solution: A Simple Framework for Strategic Clarity
So, how do you achieve this level of clarity? You need a simple, powerful framework that distills your entire strategy into a single, actionable thought. Analyzing consumer behavior patterns is essential for understanding market dynamics. This knowledge allows businesses to tailor their offerings more effectively. By leveraging these insights, companies can create targeted marketing strategies that resonate with their audience.
A most effective tool for this is the Get/Who/To/By framework, a classic creative brief model that we use as the final, critical deliverable of our Brand Truth Workshop.
It breaks down your strategy into four essential questions:
- GET: Who is the specific audience you are trying to reach? (e.g., Get mid-career professionals…)
- WHO: Who are they in a way that reveals their mindset? (…who feel stuck in their current role…)
- TO: What is the one thing you want them to do or believe? (…to consider graduate school as a path to reinvention…)
- BY: What is the single most compelling reason they should believe you? (…by providing a flexible, executive-focused curriculum and a powerful alumni network designed specifically for career transition.)
Why “By” is the Most Important Word in Strategy
The first three parts—Get, Who, To—define your objective and scope. But the “By” is where your strategy truly lives.
The “By” is your unique advantage. It’s the proof. It’s the single most persuasive point that separates you from every competitor. It’s the reason your team should feel confident and the reason your customers should believe.
How to Find Your “By”
Nailing your “By” isn’t easy. It requires a deep understanding of your customers’ needs, your competitors’ offerings, and your own unique capabilities—the very “sweet spot” we work to uncover in our Brand Truth Workshop.
Our Brand Truth Workshop is our collaborative process designed to guide your leadership team through this analysis, uncover your unique advantage, and distill it into a powerful Get/Who/To/By framework that everyone can understand and execute. Effective leadership requires a deep understanding of executive decisionmaking strategies that align with your goals. By fostering open communication and collaboration, your team can enhance their approach to tackling complex challenges. This ensures that decisions are made with confidence and clarity, leading to a more cohesive organizational vision.
If you’re struggling to articulate your strategy and want to bring this level of clarity to your organization, let’s talk.
[Link ->] Schedule a Call to Discuss the Brand Truth Workshop
The Bottom Line: Clarity is the Ultimate Competitive Advantage
If you can’t state your strategy in 35 words, you don’t have a strategy problem; you have a clarity problem. And until you fix it, your team will continue to work hard without alignment, and your resources will continue to be wasted.
The Get/Who/To/By framework isn’t just a marketing exercise. It’s a leadership tool that forces the difficult choices and trade-offs that result in a clear, powerful, and executable strategy.
