Strategy is About Choices
Stand before a Rothko painting and something remarkable can happen. The sheer scale commands your attention. A few bold fields of color, precisely balanced, create an almost physical presence. Time seems to slow. The longer you look, the more the painting reveals itself. Subtle variations in color emerge, edges that appeared sharp become atmospheric, and what seemed simple grows profound. There is nothing extraneous, nothing that doesn’t belong. The power comes not from complexity but from clarity, from choices made with absolute conviction about what matters and what doesn’t.
This is the same power truly effective strategies can have. Like Rothko’s paintings, their clear, bold choices work together as a coherent whole in surprising ways. They command attention not through intricacy, but through the courage of their clarity and depth. They reward sustained attention, revealing deeper layers of insight beneath their apparent simplicity.
Fred Gluck alluded to this in his 1980 HBR article when he defined strategy as “An integrated set of actions designed to create a sustainable advantage over competitors.” Tufan Erginbilgiç, CEO of Rolls-Royce, recently put it even more directly: “If you aren’t making choices, you don’t have strategy.” And Steve Jobs talked passionately about the inverse: “focus is about saying no,” something Rothko certainly would have appreciated, considering his belief that “silence is so accurate.”
The implication: without clear choices, about what you will and won’t do, you may have robust plans, a clear vision, or a compelling story, but you might not have an effective strategy.
The depth behind simplicity
What’s less obvious, standing before a Rothko, is the sophistication behind its apparent simplicity. His color field paintings contain dozens of translucent layers of paint, carefully built up to create luminous effects that emerge only through patient observation. This hidden complexity serves a purpose. It creates depth that draws viewers in, rewards sustained attention, and leaves a lasting impact. The simplicity we see at first glance is not the starting point but the end result of a deep, iterative process of refinement.
Similarly, the most powerful strategic choices often appear simple on the surface while being built on deep layers of analysis, insight, and intuition. In his memoir about the turnaround of IBM, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, Lou Gerstner wrote: “good strategies start with massive amounts of quantitative analysis — hard, difficult analysis that is blended with wisdom, insight, and risk taking.”
Consider TSMC’s dedication to being a pure-play semiconductor foundry. The choice itself seems straightforward: focus solely on manufacturing semiconductors for others, never competing with customers by designing chips. But this clarity emerged from a sophisticated understanding of industry economics, customer needs, and technological trajectories. Years of analysis and experience are distilled into a few clear choices that define the company’s position.
This pattern repeats across industries. Companies benefit from understanding the complexity of their industries and how they can create and capture value before identifying the essential elements to define their strategies. The clarity of such choices allows everyone in an organization to understand their role in executing the strategy.
Scale and proportion in strategic choices
Rothko was obsessed with the scale of his paintings. He wanted them large enough to envelop viewers, to create what he called a “consummated experience.” He understood that the impact he desired required choices to be made at a sufficient scale. A small canvas with the same composition wouldn’t create the same effect. The scale itself is part of the artistic choice.
The same principle applies in strategy. The scale of choices creates a gravitational pull that aligns decisions throughout an organization. Information theory helps explain why: strategy choices are signals that need sufficient strength to cut through organizational noise. Small or tentative choices get lost in the daily chaos of business. Big choices — made with clear links to either a part of a business’s portfolio or to a part of its business model — create the contrast needed to align an organization. Like a radio signal breaking through static, strategy choices need to be strong enough to be received and understood throughout the organization.
Our research bears this out, showing that five types of strategic moves matter most in driving strategy outcomes: three portfolio moves (programmatic M&A, dynamic resource reallocation, and major capital programs) and two performance moves (productivity improvement and differentiation). What’s crucial is not just making these moves, but making them at sufficient scale. Half measures rarely move the needle. Companies that execute three or more of these moves at scale are 47% more likely to move up the power curve of economic profit. Yet only about 1 in 12 companies manage to do so. Like Rothko’s precisely scaled canvases, the magnitude of strategy choices matters as much as their content.
Creating coherence
Rothko’s genius lay not just in individual elements but in how they worked together. The relationship between his color fields creates tension, harmony, and ultimately meaning. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Each element gains power from its relationship to the others.
Strategy choices display similar properties. Microsoft’s pivot toward office as a multi-platform cloud service required multiple choices that reinforced each other: changes in pricing models, development processes, acquisition strategy and partnerships, organizational structure, and culture. Each choice gained power from its connection to the others. The coherence of these choices accelerated the company’s reinvention-level change.
This coherence isn’t accidental. It emerges from understanding the deep connections between choices. Like an artist working with color theory, strategists can understand how choices interact with and amplify each other. Integrated choices can create emergent properties — outcomes greater than any individual choice could produce. The key is ensuring that choices reinforce rather than contradict each other.
The organizational challenges
Organizations naturally drift toward complexity. Business units want to pursue their own opportunities, functions want to optimize their priority processes, and every leader wants to hedge against uncertainty. Without constant attention to strategic clarity, organizations tend to accumulate initiatives, projects, and priorities until new signals are lost in noise.
Frustratingly, the more precisely we try to define our position, the more aware we become of what we might be missing. This creates natural pressure against clear choice-making. Leaders feel this acutely. Every clear choice seems to highlight the opportunities being foregone. Yet this is precisely why clear strategic choice is so valuable. In a world of infinite possibilities, the ability to focus organizational energy on what matters most becomes a crucial source of competitive advantage.
Overcoming these organizational challenges requires creating an environment where clear strategic choices can emerge and endure. Just as an artist must master both technique and creative space to produce great work, strategy leaders must master both the analytical and organizational dimensions of choices in strategy.
Making clear choices in practice
Just as Rothko created the right conditions for his art — the massive canvases, the careful lighting, the precise viewing distances — leaders must intentionally create conditions that enable clear strategic choices. The science of decision-making reveals why this is so crucial: our brains operate in two distinct modes when facing choices, as described by the late psychologist Daniel Kahneman. System 1 thinking is fast, intuitive, and emotional: perfect for daily decisions but prone to biases when facing uncertainty. System 2 is slower, more analytical, and better suited for complex strategic choices. The challenge is that both the environment in which strategy is crafted and human nature often pulls us toward System 1 thinking exactly when we need System 2 most.
Creating the right conditions for choice-making in strategy isn’t just about better analysis or processes. It’s about deliberately designing the social and organizational context in which choices get made. Here are six practices that help leaders create an environment conducive to clear strategy choices:
Set clear expectations
Strategy isn’t just about analysis or planning, it’s fundamentally about making clear choices. Signal this early and often. Make explicit that you expect a strategy process to result in concrete decisions about where to play and how to win with clear links to a portfolio or business model, not just a set of broad priorities or themes. This helps mitigate the natural tendency to defer tough choices or settle for ambiguous compromises.
Role model bold decision-making
Strategy leaders need to demonstrate the courage to make clear choices themselves. When you face a fork in the strategy road, resist the urge to take both paths or craft an elegant-sounding synthesis that avoids real trade-offs. Make the choice explicit, explain your reasoning, and move forward decisively. Your team will take cues from how you handle these moments.
Clarify decision rights
When many stakeholders want to be involved in strategy, distinguish between those who will debate the choices versus those who will ultimately decide. Keep the deciding group small while creating space for robust debate among a wider group. This maintains both the benefits of debate and the clarity needed for decisive action.
Treat choices as one-way doors
Make it clear that strategic choices, once made, will only be revisited if significant new information emerges. This creates the right tension and rigor in the decision process. If people believe choices can be easily reversed, they’ll be less thorough in their analysis and more prone to lobbying for changes later. Hard choices should feel hard — that’s a feature, not a bug.
Be explicit about uncertainty
Use a common language for different levels of uncertainty in strategy debates. Research shows organizations handle uncertainty better when they can distinguish between situations that are risky (probabilities known) versus truly uncertain (probabilities unknown). Choices in the face of uncertainty become clearer when you can debate these nuances and consider different approaches — whether they be big bets, exploratory options, or no-regret moves.
Create clear follow-through mechanisms
Detail how choices will be taken forward once made. In the strategy room, there’s often a palpable sense of the depth of insight and intuition that led to a choice. This needs to be captured and codified for effective communication and execution. Ensure that every choice has an owner, that there’s a disciplined approach to capturing its strategic rationale and ambition, and that someone is empowered to maintain high standards in this work.
The ultimate test of strategy clarity is whether each choice can be understood and managed as part of a coherent portfolio — with distinct time horizons, risk levels, and expected impacts. When choices lack this clarity and distinctness, they become impossible to manage dynamically as conditions change. Like the elements in a Rothko painting, each strategic choice must stand clearly on its own while working in concert with the others.
The art of strategy leadership
Standing before a Rothko, we feel the power of choices made with absolute conviction, and the accuracy of silence. The same power exists in strategy.
Artist Kit White wrote of drawing being about mark making:
“Every mark has a distinct character and quality. Every mark is a signature. Variation in pressure and weight is the visual equivalent of intonation… Also, a tentative line will read as such. Give every mark or line authority and make sure it serves a purpose. Try to use only the marks you need.”
The parallel to strategy is noteworthy. Every choice in strategy carries its own signature. The way we make and communicate choices — their clarity, conviction, and purpose — is the strategy equivalent of an artist’s variation in pressure and weight. A tentative choice in strategy, like a tentative mark on canvas, can be read as such throughout an organization. The lesson for strategy leaders is clear: give every decision authority and make sure it serves a purpose. Include only the choices you need.
This is the craft of strategy leadership: knowing what matters most, having the conviction to eliminate everything else, and building the organizational capability to maintain that focus over time. Like Rothko’s paintings, the best strategies achieve their impact not through intricacy but through clarity. Through choices made with conviction, built on layers of insight and intuition.
This was originally posted on November 11, 2024 in my LinkedIn newsletter The Strategy Executive’s Craft: The Art and Science of Strategy Leadership.
