Your Strategy is a Bet on the Change You Seek to Make

For decades, we've been taught that strategy is a complex, reactive game of navigating the business landscape. But in his transformative book, This Is Strategy: A Better Way to Elevate Your Work, Your Team, and Your Community, Seth Godin argues for a more generous and powerful alternative. He posits that strategy isn't a static plan locked in a binder; it's a promise. It's a generous bet on a better future—a future you intend to create for a specific group of people. It is the difficult, essential work of making a choice, of deciding who to serve and what change you seek to make on their behalf.

Godin challenges us to stop viewing strategy as a way to weather the storm and instead see it as an opportunity to be the storm. It’s a philosophy of becoming, a commitment to making deliberate choices today that lead to meaningful outcomes tomorrow.

The Real Question: "What Change Are You Making, and For Whom?"

As Godin passionately argues in This Is Strategy, the industrial-era goal of appealing to everyone is a recipe for mediocrity. The real work of strategy, he insists, is to find the "smallest viable audience"—that specific group of people who are waiting for you to show up—and make a specific promise to them. This is the fundamental shift Godin champions:

• From: "How do we capture the most market share?"

• To: "Who are the people we seek to serve, and how can we make things better for them?"

This "better," Godin explains, is the change you're betting on. It's not just a new feature or a lower price. It's a change in status, in affiliation, in how people feel. It's the transition you offer from where your audience is to where they want to be.

Consider Netflix. Their strategy wasn't just a bet that streaming would replace DVDs. It was a bet, in Godin's terms, that they could create a better experience for movie lovers stressed by due dates and annoyed by late fees. The change they made was from anxiety to ease. They served those people, and in doing so, they created a new status quo.

Your Strategy Is the Stressor on the System

The old model taught us to find stressors in the dominant system and exploit them. Godin flips this on its head: your strategy is the stressor. When you make a clear choice about who you are for, you are also making an intentional choice about who you are not for. This creates tension. It puts a crack in the status quo. By offering a specific solution for a specific group, you are intentionally applying pressure to the generic, one-size-fits-all model of the incumbent. This is the heart of disruption, viewed through Godin's lens. It's not a complicated theory; it's a simple act of generosity. It's seeing a group of people who are being underserved or ignored and saying, "I see you. This is for you."

• Blockbuster's system was built for the masses and relied on the profitable friction of late fees.

• Netflix's strategy was the stressor. It targeted a niche of early adopters who hated that friction and offered them a new story: no late fees, endless choice.

The market leader will almost always ignore this stressor because, as Godin points out, the niche is too small to be of interest. But the trust and connection you build with that small group becomes the foundation for wider change.

You don't start by challenging the king; you start by serving the overlooked.

Strategy is a Compass, Not a Map

If your strategy is a detailed, five-year plan, Godin would argue it's already obsolete. He emphasizes that a strategy isn't the map; it's the compass. It's the guiding philosophy that helps you make choices in the face of uncertainty. The specific tactics will and should change. But the core promise—the direction you are heading—must remain consistent.

This approach, as outlined in This Is Strategy, requires a continuous process of:

• Making a Promise: Clearly articulating the change you seek to make for your chosen audience.

• Telling a Story: Weaving a narrative that resonates with the worldview of those you seek to serve, making them feel seen and understood.

• Creating Tension: Making a choice that distinguishes you from the status quo. If you're for everyone, you're for no one.

• Showing Up, Consistently: Building trust through the reliable and generous act of doing the work you promised to do.

In the end, the path outlined by Seth Godin is a call to courage. Strategy is the generous act of betting on the future. Not a future that happens to you, but a future that happens because of you. It's a bet that by serving a specific few, you can create a meaningful change that matters. And that is a bet worth making.

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Here is an example Strategy for our VibeCo.Space community.

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