The Strategist's Case Against the Hype Machine

Part 1 of a 4-part series on strategy, hype, and the discipline nobody wants to do.

I often find myself in rooms with leadership teams that have spent six figures on some type of transformation roadmap. It used to be digital transformation; these days, it’s AI transformation. The same scene from a familiar play, but with different props. Slides all over the place. Timelines. Vendor logos. Excitement.

I’ll ask one question: What problem is this solving?

Silence. Not awkward silence, but confused silence. The kind where people look at each other because they genuinely don't know how to answer. They'd spent months building a plan without ever agreeing on a diagnosis.

That's not strategy. That's just motion.

Dancing in circles

I keep seeing the same three moves, and none of them are strategy.

Adopt because competitors did. A company hears that their competitor launched an AI chatbot. Within a week, someone has a deck titled "Our AI Strategy." There's no diagnosis of whether AI solves a real customer problem. There's no assessment of whether the team can actually build and maintain it. There's just the fear of being left behind, dressed up as forward thinking.

Declare a destination and call it a direction. "Be the #1 platform for X by 2027." It's on the all-hands slide. It's in the investor deck. HR instructs employees to “ladder up” their personal goals to it. But nobody can explain what's standing in the way, what trade-offs that goal requires, or why this path and not another. A vision statement is doing the work of a strategy, and a vision statement has no moving parts.

Commission a report and call it a diagnosis. A consulting firm delivers 120 slides of market analysis (real talk: I’ve been complicit in this before). Competitive benchmarks, TAM projections, and trend data. The leadership team reads it, nods, and says: now we know where we stand. But a report isn't a diagnosis. A diagnosis requires judgment. Someone in the room has to interpret the data, name the real constraint, and make a call about what it means. A document can’t have the hard conversation for you.

These aren't edge cases; this is the default. And the reason it's the default is that real strategy requires something most organizations actively avoid: an honest diagnosis of what's actually going on.

There's a machine behind all of this — the cycle of trend reports, vendor pitches, conference keynotes, and breathless LinkedIn posts that keeps telling leaders they need to move faster and think less. That's what I'm calling the hype machine.

Good f***ing strategy

So what does good strategy look like? Richard Rumelt calls it the kernel: diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions. Three parts. The diagnosis comes first because it's the hard part. It means looking at your situation honestly, naming the obstacles, and admitting what's actually going wrong.

Most companies skip diagnosis entirely.

They skip it because diagnosis is uncomfortable. It requires someone in the room to say: here's what's broken, here's why we're losing, here's the constraint we've been pretending doesn't exist. That conversation doesn't feel productive. It doesn't generate excitement. It doesn't look good in a quarterly review.

So instead, teams jump to activity. They build roadmaps without a diagnosis. They set goals without a guiding policy. They execute stuff without coherence. It feels like progress because everyone is busy, but it’s not.

Look, I know strategists aren't doctors, but Blair Enns nailed the analogy in The Win Without Pitching Manifesto: "It is common practice in the creative profession to prescribe solutions without fully and accurately diagnosing the problem. In almost every other profession such a sequence would render the professional liable for malpractice."

Bad f***ing language

Mark Pollard wrote something that stuck with me: "Big words are hiding places and good strategy doesn't hide."

He's right. And this is exactly how the hype machine sustains itself, not just by producing bad strategy, but by producing bad language that makes bad strategy invisible. When everything is a "transformation" or a "paradigm shift" or a "north star," the words stop meaning anything. They become camouflage. The hype machine doesn't need you to believe the jargon. It just needs enough of it in the room that nobody asks what the words actually mean.

I've sat through presentations where every sentence sounded strategic and none of it said anything. Jargon doing the work of jazz hands.

Here's one test I like: if you can swap your company name for a competitor's and the strategy still reads the same, it's not a strategy. It's a template with your logo on it.

Good strategy is specific. It names the problem. It makes a bet. It tells you what you're not going to do, which is the part that hurts and the part that matters. You can't hide a real strategy behind buzzwords because a real strategy has edges. You can argue with it. You can prove it wrong. And that discomfort is the signal that you're actually saying something.

The problem with selling problems

The hardest part of being a strategist isn't the thinking. It's the selling.

Real strategy starts with bad news. "Your positioning is the same as three competitors. Your team is building features nobody asked for. Your growth plan assumes a market dynamic that no longer exists." That's what honest diagnosis sounds like. And it's not what people are paying to hear.

The hype machine offers a much more comfortable product. It says: you're on the right track, you just need this new tool, this new framework, this new trend. It validates the current direction. It adds without subtracting. It never asks anyone to stop doing something they're already invested in.

Strategy does the opposite. Strategy subtracts. It forces trade-offs. It says: if you do this, you cannot also do that. And in a world where leaders are rewarded for expansion, for "yes, and" thinking, and for adding initiatives, the discipline of subtraction is a tough sell.

I've watched good strategies die in rooms where bad strategies got funded, because the bad strategy was easier to say yes to. That's not a failure of analysis. It's a failure of nerve.

Why I keep making the case

I've been doing this long enough to know that the hype machine always wins the first meeting. It's shinier. It's more exciting. It asks less of people.

But I've also seen what happens two years later. The AI roadmap that solved no real problem gets quietly shelved. The vision statement gets refreshed with a new year and the same lack of direction. The market research deck gathers dust because nobody had the nerve to interpret it, let alone act on it.

And eventually, someone in the room says: We need a real strategy.

That's when the real work begins. Uncomfortable conversations with clear words to diagnose the problem, make trade-offs, and commit to coherent actions. The unsexy, rigorous, people-in-a-room discipline of figuring out what's actually true and what to do about it.

The hype machine will always be louder and shinier. But real strategy is the only thing that actually compounds.

That's the case I’ll keep making even when the room would rather hear something easier.

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Ben Jensen is a strategic advisor and human-centered designer at DESIGNJENSEN. He helps leaders turn strategic uncertainty into decisive action. If your strategy needs an honest diagnosis, start with a Strategy Sprint: two focused sessions, one clear action plan, zero bullshit.