Strategy Isn’t About New Ideas—It’s About Cutting What’s Slowing You Down

Written by: Michael A. Rava

That's not a provocation. It's the most useful thing I've learned in 30 years of advising leaders across industries, geographies, and growth stages.

Strategy — real strategy — is not an exercise in imagination. It's an exercise in honesty.

And honesty, it turns out, is the rarest commodity in any boardroom.

The boat with anchors

Think of your business as a boat. You want it to go faster. So what do you do?

Most leaders reach for another motor. A new initiative. A transformation programme. A shiny framework freshly laminated by a consulting firm charging €400 an hour.

But the boat isn't slow because it lacks power.

It's slow because you've got anchors slung over the side — and you've stopped noticing them.

These anchors don't announce themselves. They look like strategy. They sound like experience. They feel like conviction.

They are, in reality, delusions.

An assumption about what your customer values — that your customer has never confirmed.

A belief about where your organisation excels — that the market quietly disagrees with.

A vision of what you want the business to become — that precisely nobody is asking for.

Cut those anchors. That's it. That's the whole job.

The mirror no one wants to pick up

I've worked with enough C-suites to know the pattern: the real blockers in any business are almost never structural. They're almost never competitive. And they're almost never about resources.

They are personal.

They live in the preferences, the vanities, and the untested beliefs of the people at the top.

Marcus Aurelius wrote: "The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are."

He wasn't writing about business strategy. But he might as well have been.

Most strategic processes begin with an analysis of the external environment. Market dynamics. Competitor moves. Customer segmentation.

All useful. None of it sufficient.

Because the most consequential variable in any strategic equation is the one you never put in the model: you.

You must enter every strategic conversation assuming yourself to be the problem.

Not as an act of self-flagellation. As an act of intellectual rigour.

Three questions that will give you more clarity than any framework

I recently came across something from Alex M H Smith that crystallised this beautifully. He put it in three questions — deceptively simple, genuinely brutal if you answer them honestly:

1. What do I believe that simply isn't true?

2. What do I think is important, but my customers don't care about?

3. What do people love about my business, that I didn't intend?

Sit with those for a moment.

The third one especially. Because there's almost always something there — an emergent truth about what you've actually built versus what you thought you were building. A market signal you've been quietly dismissing because it didn't fit the narrative.

Strategy isn't about new ideas. It's about seeing the truth that was there all along.

What happens when you lift the anchors

When leaders do this work — really do it, not performatively — something remarkable happens.

The business accelerates. Not because anything changed externally. But because it's finally free to be what it already was.

The market had been pulling it in a direction. The leadership had been resisting that direction. That friction — invisible, structural, expensive — was the entire problem.

Remove the delusion. Align with the signal. Push harder in that direction than you ever thought appropriate.

That's not a framework. It's not a methodology. It has no acronym and requires no slide deck.

It requires only one thing: the willingness to look clearly at yourself and ask whether what you believe is actually true.

Most leaders never get there. Not because they lack intelligence. But because the anchors are comfortable. Because the delusions are identity.

The real competitive advantage

In a world where every competitor has access to the same data, the same tools, the same talent pools — the differentiator is clarity.

Specifically: the clarity to see your business as it actually is, strip out the noise, and operate from that truth with full conviction.

That's what strategy really is.

Not a plan. Not a vision deck. Not a set of pillars.

Ruthless, honest subtraction — until what remains is the version of your business most true to what the market wants of it.

The boat doesn't need a new motor.

Cut the anchors. And watch what it does.

What's the one belief in your business that everyone treats as a given — but nobody has actually tested?

I'd be curious to hear it.

Inspired by https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alex-m-h-smith_the-act-of-true-strategy-is-not-what-people-share-7444753745902522368-6gzM/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAAH-ur4BxL4mfMIVh5cV9rjZaYQKsr-fDEQ. Thanks, Alex.