Strategy should be painful

Businesses plateau for two reasons:

1. Their strategy is wrong (Wrong Strategy Syndrome)
2. They fail to execute any strategy at all (Fuzzy Strategy Syndrome)

Unfortunately, these two separate problems have identical symptoms (stagnant growth), but opposite cures. If you think your strategy is wrong when it’s really fuzzy, you’ll start to run more experiments and make the problem even worse. And if you think your strategy is fuzzy when it’s really wrong, you’ll prune important projects that could lead to renewed growth, in order to focus on a broken core.

So it’s critically important to get the diagnosis right.