A CEO once showed me a 120-page strategy document and said, “This is why we will win.” I asked one question. “What will you stop doing on Monday?” He paused and the room went quiet. No one had an answer. I later got to learn that the company did not have a strategy. It had ambition dressed as paperwork.
A good strategy is not a plan. It is a set of hard choices that create advantage. Most leaders get this wrong. They treat strategy as expansion, growth, and opportunity. Real strategy is exclusion, focus, and sacrifice. If you are not uncomfortable with what you are giving up, you have not made strategic choices.
The core of a good strategy
At its essence, a good strategy answers one brutal question. Why will we win here, and not somewhere else? That forces clarity.
- Where you will play, and equally where you will not
- How you will win, in a way competitors cannot easily copy
- What capabilities you must build, and what you will deliberately ignore
If any of these are vague, your strategy will fail in execution.
The illusion of growth
In my work, I see this repeatedly. Financial institutions report strong growth and assume their strategy is working. It is not necessarily true, growth can come from tailwinds, liquidity in the market, a few large clients, and regulatory positioning.
Take a bank with low cost of deposits, below 1 percent. It looks efficient. But often it is because they hold large institutional funds. That is not strategy, that is position. It’s like what my mentor the late Sam Owori used to say, “for some people, the train found them at the right spot.”
When those funds move, the “strategy” collapses. A good strategy is not dependent on luck, regulation, or one client. It is built on repeatable advantage.
The discipline of saying no
The hardest part of strategy is not deciding what to do. It is deciding what not to do. I worked with a regional institution that wanted to be retail, corporate, SME, digital, and regional all at once. Everything was a priority which meant nothing was. We forced a decision.
Focus on SME trade finance in three corridors, ignore everything else for 24 months, revenue dropped in the first six months, panic set in and then margins improved. Default rates declined and customer loyalty increased.
They had finally chosen. Strategy feels like loss before it feels like gain.
Execution is the strategy
If you follow me on LinkedIn you have read my newsletter, “Execution is the Strategy”. Check it out, https://www.linkedin.com/in/mustapha-bernabas-mugisa-aka-mr-strategy-66005916/recent-activity/newsletter/ . Most strategies do not fail because they are wrong. They fail because they are not executed.
A good strategy is simple enough to act on.
- If your frontline staff cannot explain it, it will not happen.
- If your board cannot track it, it will drift.
- If your incentives do not reinforce it, it will die quietly.
- I often reduce strategy to one test. What will people do differently tomorrow morning?
- If nothing changes, you do not have a strategy. You have a presentation.
The hidden role of culture
Culture is not a soft issue. It is the execution engine. You can design the most brilliant strategy, but if your culture rewards safety over performance, nothing moves.
In one institution, the strategy was clear. Grow digital lending, fast approvals, and data-driven decisions. But the culture punished mistakes harshly. Managers delayed decisions. Staff escalated everything. Risk models were ignored in favour of “gut feel.” The strategy did not fail. The culture rejected it.
A good strategy aligns with how people behave, or it deliberately changes that behaviour.
The leadership test
A good strategy must survive pressure. When the market tightens, when a big client threatens to leave, when regulators shift the rules, do you stay the course or panic? Weak strategies collapse under pressure because they were never real choices. They were aspirations. Strong strategies become clearer under pressure.
I once worked with a during a liquidity squeeze. Everyone wanted to chase deposits aggressively. Raise rates. Compete on price. The CEO refused. “We will not buy deposits. We will deepen relationships with the clients we understand.”
It was a tough call. Competitors grew faster in the short term. But two years later, their cost base was stable, and margins were intact. That is strategy. Discipline under pressure.
What a good strategy looks like in practice
It is not complex.
- It is clear. Everyone knows the focus and the trade-offs
- It is differentiated. It creates advantage that is hard to copy
- It is actionable. People know what to do differently
- It is measurable. Leaders can track progress and adjust
- It is resilient. It holds under stress
Anything else is noise. Let me return to that CEO with the 120-page document. We cut it down to one page. Three choices, two capabilities, one metric that mattered. Then I asked again. “What will you stop doing on Monday?”
This time, they answered. Branches stopped chasing unprofitable clients. Credit stopped approving deals outside the chosen segments. Marketing stopped generic campaigns.
That is what makes a good strategy. If you are not willing to lose something, you are not ready to win.
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