One of the things I like to say is that you have to qualify for strategy.
Small companies usually die of incompetent operations, not lack of strategy, so you don’t get the luxury of thinking about strategy if you can’t execute.
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Wouldn’t this lead to actions being carried out very mechanically, potentially leading to poor outcomes too? For example devs who just do what they are told without giving thought to the outcomes we are trying to achieve
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Nope — you can have intuitive mastery of internal execution and little ability to read the market/competitive landscape. This sounds odd in theory, but is surprisingly common amongst SMEs in practice.
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I agree, but i feel like you need some northstar to align the team to execute on, so some strategic thinking is required to get started but you need to execute it well before you decide to iterate on the strategy
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Many small SMEs seem to chug along purely on “make sure cash flow is positive” and “don’t die”. A North Star is a nice to have.
It’s also not an accident that Permanent Equity’s checklist has zero strategy considerations:
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Again, not saying strategy isn’t important. Just that it doesn’t matter as much until you reach some minimum bar of operational excellence.