Why Good Strategy Matters More Now Than Ever
Part 3 of a 4-part series on strategy, hype, and the discipline nobody wants to do.
In Part 1 I described the hype machine: the cycle that turns motion into a convincing stand-in for strategy. In Part 2 I dug into why it works: bad strategy spreads because it's comfortable, and comfort is the most addictive product on the market. But if everything I've said so far is true — if the default is motion, if comfort keeps winning, if entire industries are collapsing onto the same bet — then there's a follow-up question worth answering:
Does it actually matter?
I actually think it matters more right now than at any point in my career. And the reason has everything to do with what AI has done to execution.
Executionmaxing
There are people writing honestly about this: Smith, Silva, Bina, among them. But the dominant narrative, the one that fills conference agendas and investor decks, still has it backwards: AI hasn't changed strategy. It's changed execution. Dramatically, irreversibly, and in ways that make strategy more important, not less.
Two years ago, producing a market analysis took a team weeks. Writing a positioning doc took days. Building a landing page took a designer, a developer, and a sprint. Now, a single person with the right tools can do all of that in an afternoon. The throughput is extraordinary. The immediate instinct (the one the hype machine amplifies) is to celebrate that speed and assume it's the advantage. But it’s not. Because if you can do it in an afternoon, so can everyone else.
When execution gets compressed, execution stops being a differentiator. The company that can ship fast is no longer special because every company can ship fast. The moat that used to exist around operational excellence is evaporating. And what's left when execution is table stakes?
The thinking.
The quality of the diagnosis. The clarity of the guiding policy. The coherence of the actions. All the things Rumelt described in the kernel. All the things most companies skip because they're uncomfortable. Those are the only things that still compound, because they're the only things AI can't compress.
AI can generate a hundred positioning statements in ten minutes. It cannot tell you which problem you're actually solving. It can build you a beautiful deck overnight. It cannot tell you whether the story in that deck is true. It can accelerate every step of execution. It cannot replace the judgment call that determines whether you're executing the right thing.
That judgment call is strategy. And in a world where execution is abundant, it's the scarcest resource in the room.
The fog machine
David William Silva wrote something that crystallized a frustration I've been carrying for a while. He argues that much of the AI discourse isn't technical assessment — it's marketing masquerading as technical honesty. The hype, the demos, the breathless announcements — they're not designed to help you understand what AI can actually do. They're designed to make you feel like you need to buy something before you understand it.
He calls it a fog machine, and I’m gonna go with that for a bit because it’s a useful metaphor.
Fog doesn't just obscure the landscape. It obscures your ability to know that the landscape is obscured. You can't see the edges. You can't tell where the solid ground ends and the drop-off begins. And in that fog, the brightest beacons aren't the most reliable. They're just the most visible.
This is exactly what's happening in the strategy conversation right now. The discourse itself has become unreliable. When a vendor tells you AI will transform your business, they might be right, but they also might be selling you something. When a consultant says you need an AI strategy, they might be diagnosing a real need, or they might be repackaging a trend as a diagnosis because that's what gets funded. When a conference speaker says the companies that don't adopt AI will be left behind, they might be stating a fact, or they might be performing urgency because urgency fills seats.
The problem isn't that any of these people are necessarily wrong, the problem is that you can't tell. The fog machine has made it nearly impossible to distinguish signal from sales pitch noise. And in that environment, the ability to see clearly — to diagnose honestly, to separate what's real from what's hype — becomes extraordinarily valuable precisely because it's so rare.
Clear thinking was always the strategist's job. But when the information environment itself is compromised, clear thinking goes from important to essential. The strategist who can cut through the fog and say, "Here's what's actually true about your situation, regardless of what the market is shouting". That person isn't just useful, they're the only one in the room calling out what matters.
The only remaining edge
Alex Smith keeps making a point that I think most people hear but don't fully absorb: strategy is not about being better at the same thing as your competitors. It's about creating unique value through systemic fit. It’s the configuration of choices that reinforces itself in ways that are hard to copy because they're hard to see.
This has always been true, but the compression of execution has made it urgent in a way it wasn't before.
When execution was expensive and slow, you could survive on operational advantage. You could be the company that simply did things better: faster shipping, cleaner UX, tighter ops. That was a real moat. It took years to build and was genuinely hard to replicate.
Now the tools are democratized. The playbooks are public. The best practices are a Google search away (or, more likely, an AI-generated summary away). Every company in your category has access to the same execution stack. The operational moat has been drained.
What's left is strategic moat. The unique configuration of choices that only your company can make because only your company has your specific diagnosis, your specific constraints, your specific trade-offs. Smith calls it systemic fit. Rumelt calls it coherent action. I call it the only thing left that actually compounds.
But here's what makes it hard: building systemic fit requires the nerve to stop doing things. It means looking at initiatives that are working fine and killing them because they don't reinforce the system. It means saying no to opportunities that look good in isolation because they dilute the coherence of the whole. It means making trade-offs that feel like losses today because they're bets on a configuration only you can build.
Most organizations can't do this. They add without subtracting. They optimize individual tactics without asking whether those tactics fit together. They benchmark against competitors and try to close the gaps instead of asking whether those gaps are strategic choices they should be proud of.
The irony is thick: in a world with more tools, more access, and more capability than ever before, the companies that win will be the ones disciplined enough to do less. Not less work. Less of the wrong work. The subtraction is the strategy.
As Michael Porter put it, way back in 1996, "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Without tradeoffs, there would be no need for choice and thus no need for strategy. Any good idea could and would be quickly imitated."
The democratization paradox
Here's the paradox nobody warned us about: democratized execution was supposed to level the playing field. In some ways, it has. A solo founder can now build things that used to require a team of twenty. A small consultancy can produce deliverables that used to take an agency. The barriers to making things have never been lower.
But the barriers to knowing what to make haven't moved at all.
More tools. More access. More templates. More frameworks. More AI-generated options than any human could evaluate. And all of it is noise unless you know what problem you're solving, who you're solving it for, and why your approach is the right one. The tools don't answer those questions. They just make it faster to act on whatever answer you already have — good or bad. And AI is really good at scaling things fast. Even the wrong things.
This is the democratization paradox: the easier it becomes to execute, the more important it becomes to think. And thinking — real thinking, the diagnostic kind, the kind that requires sitting with discomfort and ambiguity long enough to see what's actually true — hasn't been democratized or automated. It hasn't gotten faster or cheaper or more accessible.
If anything, it's gotten harder. Because the volume of noise has increased, the pressure to move fast has intensified, and the cultural reward system still favors action over reflection. The person who pauses to diagnose looks slow. The person who asks uncomfortable questions looks negative. The person who says I don't think we should do this looks like they're not a team player.
The strategist's job has never been to have better tools. It's to ask better questions.
In a world drowning in tools and starving for questions, that job is more valuable than it's ever been.
Slow is smooth and smooth is fast
I'm not making an argument against AI. I'm not making an argument against speed. I'm making an argument against undiagnosed speed — the kind where you're moving fast in a direction nobody examined because examining it would have required the conversation nobody wanted to have.
The case for good strategy has always been straightforward: diagnose honestly, set a guiding policy, take coherent action. Rumelt's kernel. Simple to state, brutal to practice. What's changed is the cost of skipping it.
When execution was slow, a bad strategy wasted months. Now it wastes weeks, but those weeks multiply across every team, every tool, every automated workflow running on the wrong assumptions. The blast radius of a bad diagnosis has gotten exponentially larger because the execution engine is exponentially faster. You can now build the wrong thing at unprecedented scale and unprecedented speed.
So here's the urgency: good strategy matters more now than ever, not because the world is moving faster (though it is), but because the cost of moving fast without thinking has never been higher. The fog machine makes honest diagnosis rare. The compression of execution makes strategic thinking the last remaining edge. The democratization of tools makes the question more important than the capability.
This isn't a framework — it's a stance. Slow down long enough to see clearly. Diagnose before you prescribe. Make trade-offs instead of adding initiatives. Slow the f*** down and think for a minute. Ask the uncomfortable question before you ship the comfortable answer.
The hype machine will keep running. It will keep telling you that speed is the advantage, that the trend is the answer, that the tool is the strategy. It will keep producing fog and calling it vision.
The strategist's job, now more than ever, is to stand in that fog and see clearly anyway.
Next: Part 4: The Strategist's Craft. What the practice actually demands — the toolkit, the emotional cost, and the nerve to commit.
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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.