Your Strategy Document: Have You Tried Inverting It?

Opening

Dear reader, does your company have a document titled “Strategy”? You probably do. What does it say? “Customer-centric.” “Quality first.” “Fast execution.” Most strategy documents are full of phrases like these.

Honestly, I used to feel proud writing documents like this myself. “We’re going customer-centric”—saying it gives you the sense that you’ve set a direction. The team nods along.

But something I read recently turned this idea on its head. A founder who’s built not one but two unicorn companies said flatly: that’s not strategy—it’s just nice-sounding words. Today, let’s take apart the structure behind why most corporate strategies sound plausible but don’t actually work.

Defining Strategy: Without a Choice, It’s Not Strategy

To understand this, we first need to nail down what “strategy” actually means. We throw this word around too casually.

There’s a man named Roger Martin. He served as dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and was ranked the world’s No. 1 management thinker by Thinkers50 (as of 2017). He served as strategy advisor to P&G CEO A.G. Lafley, and the results were staggering. During Lafley’s tenure (2000-2009), P&G’s revenue doubled, profit quadrupled, and market cap grew by more than $100 billion. The number of mega-brands generating over $1 billion in revenue grew from 10 to 24.

Martin defines strategy this way: “Strategy is an integrated set of choices.” Without a choice, there’s no strategy. Michael Porter said something similar in a 1996 HBR paper: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

So let’s look at “customer-centric” again. Is this a strategy? Think about the opposite. What company would ever put forward “we’ll ignore our customers” as a strategy? If the opposite is obviously a foolish choice, then it’s not a real decision. It’s just a nice-sounding phrase. This is called a platitude¹—something everyone agrees with but that drives no actual change in behavior.

The Opposite Test: Validating Strategy in 30 Seconds

The person who wrote this is Jason Cohen. He founded the software testing company SmartBear and grew it into a unicorn worth roughly $1.8-2 billion, then went on to found the WordPress hosting company WP Engine and turned that into a unicorn too. Over 23 years, he’s started four companies, and he’s a battle-tested operator who’s experienced both bootstrapping² and raising over $300 million in venture funding.

Cohen’s proposed validation method is simple. It’s called the “Opposite Test”: think about the opposite of what you chose. If the opposite is a stupid choice, it’s not strategy. Only if the opposite is also a reasonable alternative is it real strategy.

Let’s take an example. The opposite of “eat healthy food” is “eat unhealthy food.” That’s foolish. So it’s not a strategy. But what about “run a traditional Korean restaurant” versus “run a fusion restaurant”? Both are reasonable. That’s a strategic choice.

The Package Deal: You Can’t Cherry-Pick the Upside

There’s a case that shows how this concept actually works in practice: Apple Notes versus Obsidian.

Apple Notes chose seamless, integrated UX. Whether you open it on an iPhone or a Mac, it just works. The cost? No plugins. No backlinks, and limited export options.

Obsidian went the opposite direction. It chose extensibility. There are over 800 plugins, and since it’s markdown-based, you can customize it however you want. The cost? Inconsistent UX, a steep learning curve, and complicated syncing.

The key point is that both are good choices. Apple Notes isn’t wrong, and Obsidian isn’t wrong either. But each choice comes bundled with painful consequences. Cohen calls this a “package deal”—you can’t cherry-pick the good outcomes and leave out the bad ones.

The case that resonates most in Korea is Coupang. It made the strategic choice of Rocket Delivery, and paid the price of trillions of won in losses over years. It had to build out logistics infrastructure from scratch. “Fast delivery and big profits” was never a combination available from the start. Toyota’s JIT (just-in-time)³ production is another example. Inventory costs plummet, but you take on the risk that if even one part fails to arrive, the entire factory grinds to a halt.

If you line up these pairs of strategic choices, a pattern emerges: rock-bottom pricing versus premium pricing (Daiso vs. Apple), the simplicity of a small team versus enterprise-grade complexity (Basecamp vs. Salesforce), bleeding-edge speed versus stability (early Tesla vs. Toyota). In every case, companies have succeeded on both sides. But no company has ever chosen both sides at once.

The System of Choices: It’s the Set, Not the Individual Pick

We need to go one level deeper here. This is the part of the piece I found most interesting.

Take the choice of a “small team” and the choice of a “feature-rich product.” Both are good choices on their own. But do them at the same time and they collide—you can’t build countless features with a handful of people.

But what if you reframe it: “small team” + “small core product” + “extensible ecosystem”? Now each choice reinforces the others. Because the team is small, you can keep the core lean and solid, and expand everything else through the ecosystem.

This is exactly the principle behind the framework Roger Martin actually used at P&G. Called the “Strategy Cascade”⁴, it’s a set of five questions—① What is our winning aspiration? ② Where will we play? ③ How will we win? ④ What capabilities must be in place? ⑤ What management systems are required?—and the point is that these five don’t work in isolation; they only produce results when they interlock as a single system. P&G was able to grow its mega-brands from 10 to 24 not because any individual choice was brilliant, but because the choices formed a system that reinforced one another.

The Agile Manifesto⁵ embodies this same principle: “We value working software over comprehensive documentation.” It’s not that documentation is bad. It’s that you do both most of the time, but you decide in advance which one wins the moment they conflict. That’s strategy.

Oz’s Lens

From my own experience building go-to-market strategies, I get wary whenever the phrase “balanced strategy” comes up. It’s often just another way of saying “we’re not choosing anything.” The result is an ambiguous position with neither sufficient quality nor sufficient price competitiveness—one that nobody gets excited about. I’ve seen this play out more times than I can count.

Even Jason Cohen names saying “yes to every customer” in the early days of SmartBear and WP Engine as his biggest mistake. Coming from someone who built two unicorns, that’s saying something. Being able to say “no” is what makes it a strategy.

And this isn’t only relevant to companies. It applies just the same to solo creators, freelancers, and anyone running a side project. “A channel covering every topic” versus “a channel focused on one niche,” “high production quality” versus “high upload frequency”—these are strategic choices too. Both sides have success stories. The key isn’t saying “I’ll do both”—it’s picking one and accepting the painful consequences that come with it.

One caveat, though: strategy isn’t forever. When the market changes, strategy has to change too. What matters is whether you have a consistent set of choices at this point in time. Deliberately changing your strategy is a completely different thing from drifting aimlessly without one.

Closing

Here’s the summary.

First, if the opposite is a foolish choice, it’s not strategy—it’s just a nice-sounding phrase. Pull out your strategy document and run the Opposite Test on it.

Second, strategic choices are package deals. The good outcomes and the painful ones come together. Wanting only the good side without being prepared to accept the pain isn’t strategy.

Third, competitiveness is created not by individual choices but when a set of choices reinforces one another. Whether it’s a company or an individual, the identity that this set of choices creates is your competitive advantage.

I’d love for you to try just one thing today. Pick the item you’re most confident about in your strategy document (or the strategy in your head), and run the Opposite Test on it. If the opposite is also a reasonable choice, congratulations—that’s a real strategy. But if the opposite makes you think “who on earth would do that?”—it’s worth reconsidering.

References & Further Reading

• Jason Cohen, “Strategic choices: When both options are good,” A Smart Bear, February 2026.: The original piece that lays out today’s core frameworks—the Opposite Test and the package deal concept. The table of 12 strategic choice pairs midway through is especially worth a look.
• A.G. Lafley & Roger Martin, Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, Harvard Business Review Press, 2013.: The original source for the Strategy Cascade’s five-question framework. It contains the P&G case in detail.
• Michael Porter, “What Is Strategy?”, Harvard Business Review, November-December 1996 issue.: The source of the claim that “the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” An essential paper for understanding the difference between strategy and operational effectiveness.
• Roger Martin’s official site, strategy section.: An archive of Roger Martin’s writings and talks on strategy.
• Lenny’s Newsletter, “5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin”, July 2024.: An interview-style piece from Lenny’s Newsletter on how to apply the Strategy Cascade in practice.

The author, Kwangseob Ahn, is a professor of business administration at Sejong University and lead consultant at OBF (Oswarld Boutique Consulting Firm). He teaches statistics and data analysis — business data management and business analytics — while leading GTM and AI strategy consulting in the field, designing the seam between technology and business. He has published academic research on a memory architecture for AI dialogue systems (HEMA) and runs Daily Arxiv, a daily curation of global AI papers. He holds a master’s from Korea University’s Graduate School of Technology Management and a KMBA. He is the author of Homo Brainless: The People Who Outsource Their Thinking.

Footnotes

1. Platitude: A nice-sounding statement that everyone agrees with but that produces no actual change in behavior. A classic example is something like “let’s work hard”—nobody would object, but it gives no concrete guidance on what to actually do. ↩

2. Bootstrap: Growing a business using only your own capital and early revenue, without outside investment. Taking investment lets you grow fast but means giving up equity; bootstrapping is slower but lets you keep control. This, too, is a strategic choice. ↩

3. JIT (Just-In-Time): A production method in which parts are supplied only when and in the quantity needed, rather than stockpiled in advance. Toyota is the best-known adopter, which is why it’s also called the “Toyota Production System.” ↩

4. Strategy Cascade: A strategy-development framework used by Roger Martin and Lafley at P&G. Five questions (winning aspiration → where to play → how to win → core capabilities → management systems) flow from top to bottom, cascading into one integrated strategic system. ↩

5. Agile Manifesto: A software development philosophy written in 2001 by 17 software developers. It sets out four values and twelve principles that prioritize, among other things, “individuals over processes” and “working software over documentation.” ↩