No Bulls**t Strategy with Alex Smith: Why Strategy Is a Doing Discipline, Not a Thinking Exercise

Most organisations overthink strategy and underdo it.

In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones sits down with Alex Smith, author of No Bullsh**t Strategy, to explore why strategy has drifted into a thinking exercise instead of a doing discipline.

Alex explains why the fundamentals of strategy are simple, why leaders obsess over the wrong things, and why the real work starts when you make a move your competitors cannot or will not copy. From diagnosing industry flaws to the value of sacrifice and contrarian thinking, this is a grounded conversation that cuts through jargon and brings strategy back to action.

🔍 In this episode:

• Only as better than best: why out-competing rarely works
 • Sacrifice as the engine of real innovation
 • Strategy as a doing discipline
 • The macro vs micro problem in organisations
 • Why language corrupts strategic thinking
 • Why customer obsession kills good strategy
 • Diagnosing industry problems, not customer problems
 • Simple execution that people can actually act on

🎧 Keywords: Strategy, No Bulls**t Strategy, Competitive Advantage, Industry Diagnosis, Strategic Simplicity, Execution, Action, Contrarian Strategy, Leadership, Decision Making

📘 Alex’s Work: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-m-h-smith/

📬 Connect with Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones

🌐 Full episodes: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategy-meets-reality

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🔗 Full episodes, show notes, and resources: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast

📺 Watch on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality

Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to No Bulls**t Strategy
• 3:21 Simplifying Strategy
• 5:54 Key Principles
• 8:34 Strategy Needs Action
• 11:15 Macro vs Micro

Transcript

Alex (00:07)
somehow strategy has become branded as a thinking discipline, when in fact it's a doing discipline.

Mike Jones (00:15)
Yeah, I

Alex (00:15)
playing the game differently and actually

creating something new and creating something which is contrarian to the norms of your industry and then when you've done that and you've actually got some bloody ideas for once in your life

trying to out-compete your competitors by being better than them, seems very logical but it just fundamentally doesn't work

Mike Jones (00:36)
Yes, yeah.

Alex (00:36)
So

whatever the game your business is playing is you need to be the only one playing that game.

Mike Jones (00:41)
Welcome back to the Strategy Meets Reality podcast. I'm absolutely delighted today to be joined by Alex Smith, author of No Bullshit Strategy, I think which we'll go into and I think the audience realize that aligns nicely with my thinking. So great to have you on today, Alex.

Alex (00:57)
Cheers, mate, thanks a lot for having me here.

Mike Jones (00:59)
no, it's a pleasure. Just for our guest, do mind giving a bit of context and bit of background about yourself?

Alex (01:06)
Yeah, sure. I mean, I, like you, I guess, you know, I may have been an am a strategy consultant, but in recent years, I guess I built a big following around this idea of no bullshit strategy 100 % unintentionally and accidentally, because my sort of USP in the strategy market, I suppose, is that

I am completely naive and inexperienced and never studied anything, never worked for an organization that did it, never had a boss that taught me anything, never even quite, I mean, in hindsight, this sounds incredibly stupid, but I wasn't thinking about it at the time, obviously. Even when I went out to become a so-called strategy consultant on my own, I had never even read a book about strategy because I actually just simply wasn't even aware basically that the field existed. All that world of,

Porter and Blue Ocean Strategy and all that good stuff. I just hadn't heard of it. And I naively thought that I had kind of invented some sort of unique, never before seen business principles. But it turns out that I was just noticing the same thing that people have been noticing. Thousands of people have been noticing for years and years and years. But the beauty of that is that when you...

Intuit something yourself rather than learning it from a book that means that you're inevitably going to put it into new language and if you put something into new language then you open it up to a new group of people and the thing about strategy As you know is that most companies just don't do it and most people don't really engage with it So we can infer from that that the way that strategy is talked about traditionally

there's something about it that isn't quite right because it doesn't really connect with people who need to use it. I have no criticism of the substance of classical textbook strategy. It's all good stuff, but clearly people don't pay attention to it. So I wouldn't say that everybody pays attention to my version of it, but let's say it opens it up to a new pool of people and we expand the cause of strategy that little bit more.

Mike Jones (03:13)
Yeah, I think that's fantastic. I take it what you mean. It's bit like when I left the military, went into consulting, I didn't know what consulting was. So I was naive in the same thing. And actually, I think it helped me because I didn't fall into some of those, those just sort of beliefs about what consultancy should be or is. But yeah, I like the way that you're...

Alex (03:21)
Hmm.

Mike Jones (03:35)
the way that you really focus on and not simplify strategy, think, I think you use good language, but I think you definitely make strategy more accessible to people that are probably thinking, what does all this stuff mean and how can I use it?

Alex (03:49)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, I think one of the beauties of it is, and maybe this is something that traditional strategy, I think somewhat gets wrong, is that it isn't a field like medicine or law or something like that, where if you're going to practice those fields, actually need, you can't be a lawyer without knowing the law. It's not physically possible because you just need to have the information. You can't be an engineer without understanding, I don't know, how to make a bridge not fall down.

Mike Jones (04:06)
you

Yeah.

Alex (04:14)
Right?

You just can't do it. And then people have this like reflexive feeling that, strategy is sort of similar and there's obviously a big body of knowledge out there. But then we have to also acknowledge that most of the greatest strategists in history, as defined by people who have built businesses that have, you know, truly changed their markets, et cetera.

they didn't know the first thing about strategy. So imagine that is like, you they hadn't, they didn't have MBAs or whatever. They were not like ex McKinsey consultants, whatnot. So this is a little bit like, imagine if the world's top five best lawyers were people who had never studied law. Like this is the sort of situation that we're dealing with here. So what we can infer from that is that actually there really isn't much to know.

actually what we're dealing with are some very, very, very basic principles that some gifted people are lucky enough to have intuitively in their heads. 99 % of people don't, 99 % of people think in an opposite way, but a couple of sort of Steve Jobs-y type people, they just get it in their bones. And then all of that kind of body of work that has been built up around strategy is basically

Mike Jones (05:03)
Mm.

Alex (05:22)
sort of riffs and additional layers of specificity and complexity on those principles. But to get the general gist of it, you just have to understand the principles. So that actually really isn't much to know. And I think that's I think that's what's great about it, that that you you really you can I would almost go so far as to say, if you could just swallow three or four basic principles and truly

embed them in your head easier said than done then you would have the whole thing nailed.

Mike Jones (05:53)
Yeah. And I think that's, you're right about strategy or strategist. I was getting annoyed and I keep saying that strategy isn't an output. Cause I think strategy in the sort of executive MBA world and stuff like that, strategy gets distilled down into an output that you must have, i.e. you must have this slide deck with, which pretty much is, you know, the same vision pillars and then the floor of behaviors. And then people forget that

Alex (05:54)
you

Mike Jones (06:19)
actually no strategy is about a lot around intuition and observing and sensing what's going on and then responding in that way. But I think with all these stuff that you see from Porter and all the modern learning, it's all about here's a framework rather than the understanding, the underpinnings of what strategy actually is. People just get focused on frameworks. So what principles do you think, if you had to pick so,

like two or three of those principles, what would you choose?

Alex (06:50)
The first one would probably be only as better than best and people recognising that trying to out-compete your competitors by being better than them, however it is that you're defining better, is, it seems very logical and commonsensical and that's why everyone goes towards that but it just fundamentally doesn't work and it's tragic because even if you are genuinely better than your competitors, which I...

Mike Jones (06:59)
Thank

Yeah.

Alex (07:13)
Normally speaking when people say that it's it's bullshit. Anyway, they aren't really they're just kidding themselves But let's just say even if you were sadly you still won't necessarily win that battle Because well, we can get into the reasons for that if you want, but basically that's just not the way that the market works You're you're fundamentally commodifying each other over time

Mike Jones (07:33)
Yes, yeah.

Alex (07:34)
So

you need to recognise that whatever you're doing and whatever the game your business is playing is you need to be the only one playing that game.

So that's one. Another one would probably be the principle of...

sacrifice and sacrifice being important for innovation. So this is very much a question of eras. If we were talking 50 years ago, I think it would have been different because markets were less developed. But now people really have difficulty. It's very hard to come up with a new idea, right? It's easy for me to say, yeah, well, you know, just just be totally unique and just be different from your competitors and everything's going to work out fine.

But then you sit there and you try and think of that idea and you can't think of that idea because basically what's generally happened is that in most markets they're quite mature and the low hanging fruit has been picked. And if there was, if the customers were screaming out for this, like for something and no one was delivering it to them, you could just give it to them and then you'd earn loads of money. But it doesn't work that way because like everyone's giving people what nominally they want. So the only way that you can open up

Mike Jones (08:29)
Yeah.

Alex (08:34)
⁓ possibilities of newness is to drop something that other players in your category think is very, very important. And then when you do drop that thing, when you do sacrifice that thing, suddenly a new possibility comes in its place that would be impossible without dropping that thing. And this is, of course, when you get into quite good sort of defensive strategic.

territory because if your whole strategy is built on rejecting something which your competitors think is really important, it's impossible for them to go where you've gone. It's impossible for them to copy you without cutting themselves off at the knees. So that's obviously a good move. And then maybe the third one that I would say is

There's a big obsession, again, quite naturally, over thinking about what is the right idea or what is the smart idea for what the business is gonna do. And actually, the more and more I do this, the more and more I start to think that that, I'm gonna overstate this slightly just to make the point. I almost think that there is no...

Mike Jones (09:25)
Yeah.

Alex (09:37)
right or wrong idea, smart or stupid idea, the only real metric that ultimately matters is whether you go out there and do something, make a choice, take an action, which is sufficiently different and aggressive that you can expect it to deliver some form of result. And that result might be negative or that result might be positive. The main issue that you have with a lot of like strategy stuff, as you were sort of alluding to before.

The issue does not come necessarily in the quality of the thinking or anything like that. The issue comes in the fact that like you do all of this thinking but you don't actually end up doing something. You don't actually end up taking any positive action. And so you you'd be actually much better off. You could almost like reverse engineer the whole thing and say what's I mean.

Mike Jones (10:12)
Yay.

Alex (10:23)
you should think about it a little bit more than this, but this would still be better than what most people do. You almost think, what is some crazy shit that we could do, which might be smart or it might be stupid, but at least it's a thing. Let's then do that and then see how things shake out and let's learn and let's move. That is actually, ironically, more strategic than sitting down for six months like.

pouring over charts and doing analysis and building out your frameworks, but at the end, you only just tinker around the edges. like it's this lack, somehow, I guess I would summarize it, somehow strategy has become branded as a thinking discipline, when in fact it's a doing discipline.

Mike Jones (11:06)
Yeah, I

Alex (11:06)
then the type of people who go into the field and the type of people who call themselves strategists, they tend to be the sort of like the kind of

Mike Jones (11:06)
agree.

Alex (11:15)
sort of the bookish type of person, I guess, the person who thinks of themselves as being a bit of an intellectual, and that's actually extremely harmful to the discipline, because that type of person is very valuable, that type of person is a researcher, that type of person is an analyst, da da. There's a space for all of that. That type of person is not a strategist, and that is the thing that bothers me.

Mike Jones (11:23)
Yeah.

Yeah, you got some great

points there. want to just pull through the first one. You hence the name of the podcast, When Strategy Meets Reality, because it needs to meet reality. Otherwise, it's just this conceptual idea that doesn't go anywhere. We're never going to know if it's a good idea, bad idea, you know, unless we actually do it. And I really like the way you summarized that, in strategy is a doing thing, because it is. You've got to physically interact with the external environment.

And with that, I think there's too much branding comes first rather than strategy informing it. I think they have this idea of this really polished conceptual idea, but then it just stays a conceptual idea. And then the other point, which I think you were talking about, about finding new ways you have to sacrifice something. I was reflecting, I think that's probably where...

Apple is right now because they've got nothing new and I don't think they're willing to sacrifice anything to find something new because what they have is quite good. So they seem to be in that comfort zone of the herd at the moment. I don't know what your thoughts on those.

Alex (12:51)
Yeah,

I mean, you get like, this obviously isn't a problem that most businesses will ever face, but certain businesses, certainly the greatest brands, they have a kind of like a very strategic period when they do do something new and they build their reputation and they build all of that brand equity, et cetera, which was obviously the Steve Jobs period. And then they can basically draw down

on that for a hell of a long time, decades and decades. And that's where they start to produce shareholder value really, when they're actually like, you build the thing and then you milk the thing. The only issue is that like, can't, if you're very skillful, and I think they are very skillful, you can continue that milking for an extremely long period of time without hurting the business. But there comes a time, or only hurting it a little bit.

Mike Jones (13:41)
No, you're right.

Alex (13:44)
But there does come a time when you start to hit a period of diminishing returns. And I don't think that Apple are there yet. I think that, you know, they were just so, what they did in their heyday was just so incredible that they've still got road to run on. And so in a sense, they don't need to really.

Mike Jones (13:52)
No.

Alex (14:04)
worry about it, but you see it much more with like, there are lots of other brands in exactly the same situation, but where they draw down much, much more quickly. So like car brands, luxury brands, stuff like that. With luxury brands, you see it all the time, know, where with the, you know, the sort of Burberrys and Louis Vuittons of this world, where they sort of fall into like they...

Mike Jones (14:22)
Hmm.

Alex (14:27)
they overexpose themselves and then become uncool. And I think that, I mean, I haven't studied them. I think that Louis Vuitton one way or another have managed to somehow pull it back. I'm not sure how they did that. But there was definitely a time when Louis Vuitton was a bit overexposed and they were then starting to kind of like corrode what made them special. But, you know, at the end of the day, most businesses will never get into such a position of strength that they have anything to draw down on. So not something that most businesses need to worry about. ⁓

Mike Jones (14:36)
yet.

Yeah. No, no. And

I think that's the most businesses is always that adaptations that they need to do. Like, yes, we do that. But I suppose keeping that eye on the future, what's changing and where do we need to go next? I think it's a constant. And I suppose this comes back to the point why strategies are doing thing that, you know, if you if you're fortunate enough to be like an apple.

where you've got a long time to sort of seize and sense. If you're in a business that doesn't have that opportunity, you have to do those multiple experiments to see what's going on. Learn quickly and keep adapting, keep learning from there.

Alex (15:33)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but then, know, it's, there's another interesting point within that which...

people.

A lot of the time you'll see people use chess as an analogy for strategy.

Mike Jones (15:44)
Mmm.

Alex (15:44)
which I sort of have some problems with because what it suggests, which is I think this is the way that a lot of businesses approach strategy, is that it sort of suggests that you are kind of like...

The thing that gets right is that it suggests that you're looking out at the landscape, i.e. the chessboard, and you're responding to the context. So based on what is happening out there in the landscape, in the market, you are then responding to that. That is true. The thing that isn't true about it is that chess is obviously a series of small moves, which, like, built over time. So, you know,

This is the same as like, you know, a business over a course of a five year period. They might see themselves as like, we're always looking out there, what's happening. And we're like responding to this, responding to that, da, da, da, da, da. But all of those small moves, that's ultimately like, they're a big bucket of tactics, right? But they don't actually add up to a strategy, which would be at a sort of a higher level concept, which isn't about make moving this piece or that piece. It's about the actual broader theory.

Over what you're trying to do and I suppose in I don't know enough about chess to be on firm ground here I suppose that if you're an amazing chess player There are macro strategies that you can take into a chess game Which guide the moves that you're going to make so you aren't purely being reactive, but most people ⁓ so that would be a strategy but most people I'm being a bit garbled here, but you'll see what I mean Most people think that the moving of the pieces on the chessboard is strategy and so when they're doing business they think that like all right our strategy for

Mike Jones (16:59)
Yeah.

Alex (17:16)
Q1 2026 is we are going to kind of like tweak this product and we're going to open this office and we're going to like fire this person and they're making all these moves but that isn't strategy that's just a bunch of shit that you're doing like reactively based on whatever you need to do in the day to day but the strategy is actually you need to think about the macro move that the whole business is making and that macro move is something which

Mike Jones (17:28)
Yeah.

Alex (17:44)
which doesn't change quarter to quarter, year to year, or frankly, even decade to decade, because the macro move is defined by the basic question of what is the point of this business? What is the job of this business? What does this business exist to actually produce in the market? And that is not something that you can change quickly. And it takes years and years to actually even take ownership of that space.

Mike Jones (17:57)
Yes.

Alex (18:12)
So, so like you get this sort of like, and I can understand why people struggle with this because it's a fairly kind of sophisticated idea, but you have this situation where the more macro your thinking gets, the less it changes at the sort of top of the strategic pyramid. You have this idea of like the fundamental thing that this business exists to offer is X and we need to get that right. But once we've got it right, that

In theory, that might never change forever. So that's like the highest level of strategy. And then as you go down through the executional layers, the speed of change gets faster and faster and faster. So imagine, let's say, beneath the macro business strategy, you might go down one click and you might have something like brand. Now brand.

Mike Jones (18:43)
Yeah. Yeah.

Alex (19:02)
is also quite a long-term thing, but you might evolve it and change it from time to time. So it's a slow moving thing, part of the business. It does change, but again, how much has Nike's brand changed in the last 50 years? It's evolved, but it's not like changing.

Mike Jones (19:19)
Yeah, and this is the thing I often talk about in the sense of, know, like Leigh said, you've got grand strategy, which is in the sense that the idea that, that existential question that starts, like what are we actually here for? What do we do? But the thing is, what frustrates me is when you see people go for these strategy days, that just kills me anyway, but then they pontificate.

and they go through this like existential question every year. And I think why, yeah, yeah. I was like, why are you trying to redefine something that is enduring all the time rather than you saying that, okay, what's, you know, that's pretty enduring. What we're looking at now is what's our current position relationship with the external environment and what do we need to do to maintain that, sustain that advantage or...

Alex (19:48)
Yeah, that doesn't make sense. ⁓

Mike Jones (20:14)
viability, but I think they look at the wrong thing and that's why they sort of get drawn into this vision statement, these grand statements.

Alex (20:18)
Mm.

Yeah,

100 % what you're talking about is a huge confusion in terms that happens where like

They're trying to basically just put, as you say, some sort of fluffy label on the business as it currently is. And they're trying to put that at this top of this pyramid when actually, and they're basically trying to describe things as they are now or things as they have been in the past. They're not trying to define a move that the business is going to make in order to be successful. So they...

Mike Jones (20:50)
Yeah, agree.

Alex (20:52)
They're right to be thinking at the highest level. So that part of what they're doing is correct. But where they're wrong is that they aren't thinking of it in terms of like, what move is this business going to make? And then if they had made that decision and they'd made that decision well, as you say, they wouldn't need to keep on revisiting this every year in the same way as the like, you know, like Apple back in like Steve Jobs heyday, they were not

they were not presumably having to these conversations all the time because everyone knew what the hell this company was doing. And then you could actually just, then you could just get on with doing it. And yeah, the confusion of terms is a sort of nightmare, which again, I guess with my book and part of the reason why it was successful is that for the most part, because I don't really know what the sort of...

Mike Jones (21:25)
Yes.

Alex (21:47)
business speak jargon terms mean, because I've never been in a scenario to use them, I just avoid them altogether and just instead talk about things from first principle. when you use a terminology, well frankly, even strategies like this, obviously, but when you start to use terminology that is well trodden, like mission or USP or like unique value proposition or whatever, these things,

they have very blurry ambiguous meanings for people. Whereas you can talk about those things, but my challenge to people is, all right, I want you to talk about that thing without using that term. I want you to just say what you mean. So don't tell me about your vision or whatever. Just say, if what you mean by that is vision is the thing that we want to happen, right?

If that's what you mean, then just say the thing that we want to happen, because then everybody is going to be on the same page here. And we can also recognize, just using that as a small example, like if we lay out the thing that we want to happen, that is not the same thing as laying out the way that we are going to make that happen. So immediately we can see that there's a problem there, right? Like just cause we solve our vision, it doesn't mean that we know what we're going to do with the company because you know, that's like saying, I want to become a movie star.

Mike Jones (22:58)
Yay.

Alex (23:09)
my vision, but now I'm just gonna sit on my ass and just wait for it to happen. Well, it's not gonna happen. So we still, we're missing something, we?

Mike Jones (23:13)
Yeah. Yeah.

And most of these as well are what I call effects. I totally agree with you with the language because I get annoyed as ex-military when people bastardize mission and all that stuff, not actually understand what it means, where it comes from. It's not a purpose statement. It's a very clear, unambiguous order for someone to do something. But that's the point about most things are effects. Like they say, oh, we want to

Alex (23:27)
Hahaha

Mike Jones (23:40)
be the high performing this or we want to be the best this. And I'm like, well, no, that's an effect that you hope to achieve. It's not the outcome at which you want to achieve. You achieve the outcome is in like, this is what we will do. And then the effects will happen. We'll see that actually if we were right and we did do these things, that then we would start to emerge positive effects that we want to see. That'd be good.

Alex (23:47)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jones (24:05)
but you can't start with the effect because we need to figure out what you're going to do to produce those effects. Does that make sense?

Alex (24:12)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does.

100%. And in one way that I sometimes talk about this to try and remove the ambiguity from it. And a lot of it is about getting your language so people want to play these stupid games that you're talking about, they can't help it. So a lot of the game that then we have to play is we have to use such precise language that it becomes physically impossible.

for people to play these stupid games. So one example of this that I sometimes use is I say like,

Instead of thinking necessarily about like strategy, which then a person's gonna go into all sorts of like funny stuff Instead we use the terminology. I use the terminology What is the new thing you want to create that didn't exist before? Now is this a synonym for strategy? No but because because it uses the word new and thing implies something

like it can't just be a vague idea, it has to be something quite sort of physical and real, i.e. a manifested action. And then that didn't exist before, that stops the person from just sort of like repeating kind of truisms. Do see what I mean? How like you start to box people in where it becomes very, you're trying to remove all of the sneaky ways that people unwittingly use to sort of...

Mike Jones (25:30)
Yeah.

Alex (25:38)
descend into sort of sludgy bullshit. And it's impossible to stop people completely. They'll find a way, but you can make it hard for them.

Mike Jones (25:41)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And you always have that battle. I'm always like, what is it that, you know, what is it that you're not happy with now and what do you need to do differently to get this point? But I get your point exactly. I try and do the same thing is, is try to remove, move to fluffy words and the connotations. It's almost like, um, if you go into an organization, you mentioned the word culture, um, straight away, we've just got this.

this inherent need or inherent reaction in organizations to suddenly just have verbal diarrhea and just talk crap. And I think this is the same with strategy. Soon as you mention the word strategy, suddenly we have this inherent response, which means, oh, we must produce a financial chart or we must produce this PowerPoint that has this and that's what it means. Rather than actually, if we can tackle it from a different way, we still get in the same

thing which is strategy, we're avoiding all the cliches, the nonsense that confuses people and essentially disengages a lot of people because it's like, wow, we've got another strategy refresh, okay. It's the same. ⁓

Alex (26:55)
Hmm

I ever... Sorry.

I was just say, I every single person, every kind of business leader on the planet, I think should be forced to read the ⁓ original 2006 Tesla strategy that Elon Musk wrote, the Tesla master plan, they just, people need to see what a real strategy looks like, and then they'll find it much, much easier to copy it. And because that's basically,

Mike Jones (27:15)
Yes.

Alex (27:28)
three paragraphs written down with the don't have a single number in them, ⁓ then I think to me that's a penny dropping thing for some people where they see that and they're like, ⁓ right. So I just need to make something like this. And that's gonna get them a lot closer. And until this day, I certainly have never found any.

Mike Jones (27:34)
Yeah.

Alex (27:51)
You could, you can create a hypothetical piece of strategy to use as this example, but I've never ever found a real strategy out there in the wild, which is even sort of one 10th as well, as well articulated as, as that one. So I, that's a really good tool, I think.

Mike Jones (28:09)
Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's great because I was reflecting, I heard someone talk yesterday about, oh, what bank was it? It was a British bank. think it's, who's the one with the black horse? What's the name? Lloyd, yeah. And they say, that was it. Yeah. And they said their strategy is to make a prosperous UK.

Alex (28:20)
Lloyd's.

No they didn't.

Mike Jones (28:27)
Yeah, he did. They

did. They did yesterday. I was like, piss off. That's not true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is the thing where you look at the, ⁓ the Tesla strategy and I'll, I'll find it and put it in the, the comments so people can see it. But he's basically, he, recognized that, in the EV market, everyone was making basically affordable cars, cheap cars, but

Alex (28:32)
Yeah, I would have to agree with you on that.

Mike Jones (28:55)
EVs are quite expensive. Correct me if I'm wrong here. And then he's like, well, if they're doing that, then we're going to do this and we're going to create high performance sports cars that is completely different to what everybody else is doing. But it's very succinct. I probably do in disservice there.

Alex (29:08)
Yeah,

mean, that's more or less it, baby. I guess the structure of it, which I consider to be not 100 % a universal structure for strategies, but definitely 95 % of strategies would fit this structure, is that he basically... I mean, now I'm about to go on a real rant about something that really bothers me.

He does exactly the right thing and it's not what anyone else does. What he does is he diagnoses an issue, not that the customer has, he diagnoses an issue with the industry that he's playing in. So his level of focus is not how can I help the customer, that's secondary. His level of focus is looking at my entire industry, in this case the EV industry.

Mike Jones (29:51)
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alex (30:04)
what is wrong with this industry? What is the flaw that needs to be fixed? And as you say, know, so he basically figured out that it was actually nonsensical that the industry was focused purely on economy when this was actually an incredibly expensive technology. So basically you end up producing cars that are simultaneously shit, but also expensive. And he's like, well, no wonder people don't want this thing. We need to actually like accept that this is...

a very expensive technology, so at this stage it's only going to be embraced by early adopters and early adopters are going to want something that basically they can show off with and which is super cool and that's actually going to be a supercar, it's not going to be an economical car, therefore we're going to start at the top of the market, supercar, and we're going to work our way down as the technology becomes more affordable, unlike doing what everyone else was doing which was starting at the bottom and presumably, hypothetically, planning on working their way up.

obviously built the entire EV market, this strategy. what I just said is basically the entire strategy. But the thing that is special about it, which is thing that I mean to be universal, is that he is diagnosing an industry problem and then proposing a solution to it. And what most people do is they immediately jump to, and this is the advice you see everywhere. So many people just are so obsessed with this piece of advice.

which is just such a.

misleading piece of advice. Everybody thinks it's about solving customer problems, right? And, and like, and it's

Mike Jones (31:34)
Yeah. Yeah.

Alex (31:38)
I'm not saying that it isn't about solving customer problems, but what I'm saying is, is that if you take that mindset into the process, you're never gonna come up with a good idea. It's extremely unlikely you're gonna come up with a good idea. You have to think about solving industry problems, and then laterally, when you have an idea, you can then tie that to customer problems. That's the easiest job in the world. Like, you can come up with any random idea, and you can then post-rationalize a way

that people would want this because again even if we look at that Tesla example like did he solve a customer problem no because there was no one out there at that time being my goodness if only I could have an electric sports car ⁓ it's such a it's such a problem in my life that I don't have an electric sports car right there was no customer problem really what there was was

Mike Jones (32:24)
Yeah.

Alex (32:31)
what there was was a kind of a misalignment and a vacuum within the industry. And then, yeah, how we end up then, how we end up then selling that to customers, that is a, not to be controversial with the terminology, but you'll understand my meaning, that is a marketing challenge, which is a second order activity, but not a first order activity. So yeah, but long story short.

Mike Jones (32:53)
Yes, yeah, yeah.

Alex (32:58)
If you think about your own strategy and you just basically, you're not going to go too far wrong if you think like, what is the problem with this industry that I need to fix? That is going to steer you quite well. That sort of structuring of the strategy.

Mike Jones (33:15)
Yeah,

and that's the thing when you look what pains me and you're exactly right. What pains me is when you look at people's strategy and it is completely internal focused and it's not actually addressing anything external and their strategy will be something like, oh, we're gonna be customer centric, sustainable. And you're thinking that's not, that's not, that's not a strategy, that's just a,

I don't know where, honestly I'm writing my own book at the moment and I'm trying to figure out how we got from the idea of strategy, from where it was, from the early starts of Sun Tzu to where we are now in this ludicrous sense that I think, unfortunately, and I'll put you in this bracket Alex, I like to put myself in the bracket, but there's not many of us.

that are actually talking sense about what actually strategy is and all this other stuff that confuses it are second or third order parts of the execution.

Alex (34:21)
It is weird. is... I do have a theory on why it is though. That... You know the... You know the Myers-Briggs thing.

Mike Jones (34:28)
Yeah, unfortunately, yeah.

Alex (34:31)
So I know that like, you know, it has a lot of critiques, there's, it's obviously like people like it enough as that it has truth within it. And one of the spectrums within there is the, what is it? S versus I or something, sensing versus interior thing, which my basic understanding of this, which definitely does hold true.

out there in the real world is that you're talking about people who like zooming in, detail people, or you're talking about people who like zooming out. And the question is, which of these is your default mode? Which of these do you sort of rest at? Which of these do you feel more kind of like physically comfortable with? And I believe that I've read that something like people who like, both of these are very useful skills, but they're just fundamentally very difficult.

Mike Jones (35:02)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alex (35:23)
different skills. like, you know, if you're very good at zooming in, then this is what the skill that you need to be a scientist for sake of argument. But the zooming in is much, much more common trait amongst the general population than zooming out. It's something like, I don't know, under 20 % of people feel more comfortable with the zooming out. And then

Mike Jones (35:31)
Yeah.

Alex (35:51)
What you then get with this is that like, you just accept that most people in business, their natural comfort zone is to increase detail and go in on a problem, then the way that they do strategy without even thinking about it is they're have this sort of like, I'm gonna go in, I'm gonna borrow approach to strategy, which obviously little unbeknownst to them, they're actually like sort of,

running away from the task. And so you have to have a very, very powerful manual override to force these people to do the opposite of what is comfortable and to zoom out. And then the people out there who are sort of comfortable with strategy, I think to a greater or lesser degree are just people who just randomly happen to not like detail basically. I I personally...

Mike Jones (36:45)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alex (36:48)
can't really process detail very well at all. So my comfort zone is just doing the opposite. And so that means that I would be the world's worst scientist, right? But I'm good at this. So when we just go out there and we recognize that like we're talking, even that thing I was saying before about like, you need to take an industry view approach to do strategy, that...

is so uncomfortable. That's like, I think, physically painful for people to lift their head up and look at that level because it's like they're putting themselves out in the cold. They're putting themselves well out of their comfort zone. That's my theory.

Mike Jones (37:22)
Yeah, Yeah,

yeah. I like that theory. you know, I'm a psychologist, well, I probably term myself more as systems thinker now, but I've assessed a lot of people and majority of the people that I have assessed have very little in that what we call open to experience that, that, bit about the, the being really curious and the mainly

Alex (37:43)
Mm.

Mm-hmm. That's interesting.

Mike Jones (37:49)
Yeah, mainly, especially leaders that really focus on detail and a lot of them as well. They've come from there as well. So they've come from the tools. So they know the detail as well, which is quite hard. And I've never, I've never had the situation where I've had to tell someone, well, well, well, well, come back down. You're, you're, you're thinking too, you're thinking too high level now. I've never had, I've loved that. I've never had it, but as always, I'm trying to drive them up and say, come on.

Alex (38:16)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (38:18)
Let's not worry

about booking rooms right now. Let's think about ⁓ bigger problems.

Alex (38:24)
One quite nice way that I heard that this, I think was something that Roger Martin said, and it isn't like, it isn't sort of technically exactly true. It's an over, which I think he himself possibly admitted. It's an oversimplification, but I'm a big fan of oversimplifications if they actually help the penny drop with people. He said something along the lines of, like, it was something like,

Marketing is how you deal with your customers and strategy is how you deal with your competitors. Now, there's lots of holes that you can pick in this, but I actually think that what's really nice about it is that most businesses do not, I mean, they might not be good at dealing with their customers, but they at least recognize that it's important and they try to do it. Whereas again, like,

Mike Jones (39:00)
Yeah.

Alex (39:16)
most what you generally get is that like businesses they just don't really think about it's funny because you'll always get people saying hey i i don't worry about my competition i just worry about doing an amazing job kind of thing like this is such a fucking amazing thing and that's all you're really saying and if you say that is like i don't really care about context like i don't you know i'm driving a car i don't really care about where the road is i'll just go plunging into the ditch because i i choose where i go like it doesn't make any sense of course

Mike Jones (39:28)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alex (39:44)
you need to be responsive to context. Competitors are your context. And so even if, even though it's like over simplistic, I do think that if people just recognize I've got two parties that I need to deal with here, I need to deal with my customers, of course, nobody forgets that part really. And I need to deal with my competitors. Everybody forgets that part. Even that would just be a huge step forward for a lot of people.

Mike Jones (40:10)
Got it.

Yeah, and I always say to leaders, it's all about the external environment, your relationship with it is really important. As in like, what's your competitors doing? Or not even so much that because I do a lot with private sector, public sector, and necessarily they don't have competitors to a point, they do, but we think about, okay, so who else is out there? What else is happening?

What are they doing? What's your relationship with them? And I think just trying to realize, you said earlier quite nicely, you said about defensive strategy, which is good because it highlights that there are different strategies like the collaborative strategies, there's competitive strategies, there's these things they can do. they don't, it's hard to get them to think beyond the organization.

Alex (40:55)
Yeah, exactly. And for all the reasons that we discussed, you you're a military man. the topography of the battlefield, it like matters, right? And so it's like, it's so common sensical to say that, that you sound stupid to even make the statement. But like to see the topography, you actually have to look out.

Mike Jones (41:06)
Yes. Yeah.

Yeah.

Alex (41:20)
Like you sort of have to look out of your window, so to speak.

Mike Jones (41:23)
And this is the point, like what you were saying earlier about how you, you, you, you said it naively coming to strategy because you didn't, that was the same when I left the military, I just assumed that organizations had this thing strategy nailed because they do. And, and how they organizations do it must be this magical way of doing it. That's completely different to the military. And then

Then I started coming into organisations and I was just like, what is this? Like, I can't make sense of it. Because of that reason, we're so ingrained to one, assume chaos and two, to always look out. And it's not really about what we're doing, it's about what's happening out there. And then we find the best way to get advantage from that changing landscape that's happening.

Alex (41:53)
You

Mike Jones (42:15)
That's what I couldn't make sense of when I was looking at strategies because they were all not strategies. They were just statements, normally truisms and in the wrong order. So people were, you know, trying to solve like second order things, sixth order things rather than the actual strategy itself.

Alex (42:38)
Yeah,

I mean, there's a subtlety as well here where like to give the devil his due, know, the big organisations, like, you know, I've worked in organisations where also, as in I've had clients who also have done or were doing or whatever work with like the big consultancy firms and, you know, the BCGs of this world and stuff like that. And so you see the work that they're doing and like, you know, and I'm not going to sit here and say it's all bollocks because it really isn't.

and there are reasons for the work being done that way. what you also see a lot of is that like...

those documents, it's not like being fair, it's not like they will ignore competitive context and stuff like that. And they'll have, know, matrixes that plot the different people in different parts of the market and customers who research that say, you you're thought of in this way and your competitors thought of in that way, da, da, da. So they take this like, they take this good snapshot of things as they are, they're then, so.

Mike Jones (43:20)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alex (43:41)
some lip service is being paid to this but then there are two issues here. Issue number one is that

what you can observe in a kind of natural human way is much, much more sophisticated than what you can capture in a sort of put it on a chart kind of way. like, so, so, so, you know, if we were taking an industry like, I don't know, let's say like the, well, ⁓ the running shoes industry or something like that.

Mike Jones (44:01)
Yeah, yeah.

Alex (44:10)
There's a whole bunch of like stuff that we could research and put on a chart and put in a deck that give you sort of facts about the dynamics of this industry. And that is valuable. But at the same time, we could just intuit, could just sniff certain more sophisticated dynamics that are also happening. Things that like you find it hard to put into words and you couldn't put a number on, but we sort of all know to be true. Like, know, well, you know, like

I mean, I don't know what it would be precisely, but it'd be, well, you you know how like basically people who like Adidas are like this, but people who like Nike are kind of like that. And it's just, and everyone would kind of nod along to it and recognise it, but we wouldn't really be able to sort of like researchify it per se. like, you need, someone needs to have the confidence to be open to that more gestalt form of observation. And it's again, using the military.

Mike Jones (45:01)
Yeah.

Alex (45:05)
you know, analogy, like you could, like if you're looking out at the topography of the battlefield, there's a gestalt view that you get when you look at the whole thing en masse and you then can intuit things from that versus sort of like a micro version of the picture, which is actually going to be fundamentally incomplete because it's like chopped it up into little chunks that don't represent the whole. So that's one issue. And then the second issue is that like

we can, companies can become very good. Let's say even if we didn't have that issue, but we're still just like, we do all this mapping of the competitive set. Companies can be very good at compiling a snapshot of things as they are, but that's not, but then that still begs the question of how could things be? What is the, what could we then do? And at that moment you move into the world of speculation and of the...

Mike Jones (45:54)
Yes.

Alex (46:01)
for natural reasons, people don't feel very comfortable with speculation. But the problem is, that like to do good strategy, you have to take that speculative step. You have to step into a world where you fundamentally don't have substantiation, where you're just saying, well, what if we just blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And because you cannot really, you cannot like, you know, sort of

processify, dataify speculation. This, guess, is where a lot of these projects, they sort of fall down because there fundamentally needs to be one person in the room who is prepared to just say, you know what, I just reckon that because of XYZ, if we do such and such, then it will work in the way that Elon Musk did with that Tesla thing.

Mike Jones (46:51)
Yeah, and that's the thing. I always say strategy stands at the edge of the unknown because it is unknown. You know, we're we're not we're not repeating something. Well, we don't want people to do. We don't want to repeat something. It's only happened because you like I said, you're going to get yourself in a whole different world. But and I had this once with a client and their words to me would be, but how do we know this is going to work? Yeah. And I'm like, we don't. But what we do do.

Alex (47:14)
Yeah, right.

Mike Jones (47:19)
is look to things to give us feedback if it is working. And that's what we want. We want to stay connected. just as we are looking, that's that intuitive part. That's that sensing that now we've done this, how is that meeting reality? And how would we know if that is a good thing or a bad thing?

Alex (47:24)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and

normally you can get long before you've spent too much money or taken too much risk, you can normally get a lot of sort of positive, meaningful signals that bubble up, that give you the confidence to press forward. And these informal anecdotal signals are, you know, they're much, they're extremely valuable. You know, they can speak.

They can speak volumes. If we go back to the Tesla thing, you know, before they built that car, you you could have very easily shit all over that strategy. You could have said, well, hang on a second. There's absolutely no demand for this. Why would people want an electric sports car anyway? It doesn't make sense because people who want EVs, they care about the environment and a sports car just goes against that completely. I could create a whole list of reasons why.

Mike Jones (48:24)
Yay.

Alex (48:38)
this was a bad stra- in hindsight we all think it was good but like just put yourself back in that moment you could say you could tell you could give a reasons why why this was a bad why this was a bad idea but at the same time and I assume that they also probably had a lot of like signals that would have given them confidence so I mean I would imagine at that time you know when they start even I'm even talking about like incredibly little things like when you tell somebody what you're gonna do

Do they respond like, shit, yeah, that's cool, or something like that, right? That means something. I did this post, I should dig it, I should repost it at some point, because I mean, I don't think it did very well, but I liked it, where I said that like, the most meaningful feedback that somebody can give you on your strategy by far is actually if somebody says that it is cool, because like,

Mike Jones (49:10)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you're right.

Alex (49:32)
It sounds very, very superficial, but there is so much hidden meaning in somebody describing something at call. Firstly, it means that they understood it, so that's obviously important. Secondly, it means that there was basically something sort of surprising in it. And by definition, sort of surprise is a core aspect of strategy. It's like, I never thought about it that way. So it gives, it tickles people, right? It gives people that, it moves people's headspace. So that is...

Mike Jones (49:56)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alex (49:59)
fundamental to good strategy and it also has a bit of kind of mischief or adventure about it, like it sounds like something that would be interesting to do. Now if you tick all those boxes with your strategy I find it very hard to imagine you going wrong, really.

Mike Jones (50:16)
Yeah, I agree.

Again, it doesn't have to be when you're looking at, you know, like numbers or all this. I think we get trapped in this thing that has to have this perfect response where I've done a strategy of a client. It was a supplier strategy. There were some more supplier trying to get in with these big, really large company and they've been failing. They keep losing out. So we've got a strategy and

When we said, how would we know that this has worked? And the exec team or the leader at the time turned around and goes, well, I'll know if it worked if they came to my office.

And I was just like, what? he's just like, yeah, and that was the measure. to people in the strategy world, yeah, people in strategy world, well, that's not a measure. That's not a thing. It has to be this. But no, for them to know that that strategy worked meant that instead of him going to their office, they would come to his and...

Alex (50:57)
That's cool. I like that.

That's an amazing measure. I love

that. I might steal that. That's really good.

Mike Jones (51:15)
Yeah, and

then funny enough I get a phone call, know, probably, know, 18, no, not even, it wasn't even that, was probably just over a year. And I get a phone call and it was him going, guess who's just walked into my office? And that's what I thought, I was just like, laugh. I was like, yeah, okay, cool. All right, let's have a look at what we need to do next. Yeah, yeah.

Alex (51:30)
Ahahaha!

That's brilliant. That is really

good. That is really good.

Mike Jones (51:40)
But I think that's where you really take out all the crap and the just unnecessary language and words and measures and overcomplicate it to really strip it back to thinking, what is it that we're doing? then, know, just like Tesla, I went to, I went in operations for eight months in Afghanistan with one piece of paper. That's all I needed, which is what do they want me to do?

Alex (52:02)
You

Mike Jones (52:05)
And what are my constraints? And that was enough. And I this is a problem with executing strategy is that they overcomplicate it, which means then the people that are there to execute it and do it and make it happen, they don't understand it or it's too narrow where actually you just need to tell me what you want. And I will look at if I'm R and D department, I'll go, okay, what does that mean to me? What do we need to do to enable that to happen or HR or all those people?

rather than making it over complicated.

Alex (52:33)
Well,

you have to be comfortable, which is obviously not an issue that people have in the military, but it is an issue people have elsewhere. You have to be comfortable in telling people what to do and giving orders. And I think that's another restrictive factor that people have that like, know, don't like it when I say this, but I think it's true. think that like a lot of people are just too nice to do strategy. ⁓

Mike Jones (52:46)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, consensus through

madness.

Alex (53:01)
And there's a reason why people don't like Elon Musk, right? Or Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, like all of these people who have just been proven to be masters, everyone fucking hates them. So it's like, this is a feature, not a bug. Now I'm not saying.

Mike Jones (53:06)
Yeah, all Steve Jobs in that part of the room.

Yeah.

Alex (53:23)
that you have to be a total asshole or anything to do this. I wouldn't sort of self-brand myself as a total asshole. That being said though, now that I think about it, I can pontificate about strategy. The truth is, that I have never and will never run a 10,000 person organisation in a strategically effective way. And I am not gonna claim, although I'm this sort of like,

strategy guru kind of thing whatever I don't think that if you put me in charge of that sort of organization I don't necessarily think I would have the chops for it so actually like I am I'm proving my own point like you know like like I really off the top of my head I can't think of a so-called non problematic individual

who has really put their money where their mouth is and done this game supremely well. Every single person who has number one, done incredible strategy and number two, done it at a scale of a large organisation, everyone I can think of, basically people hate. Even Richard Branson, like I know that he's got this quite cuddly reputation. I know people who've worked with Richard Branson and they think he's an absolute twat. ⁓

Mike Jones (54:40)
Yeah.

Alex (54:40)
So,

this is maybe just how it has to be.

Mike Jones (54:44)
Yeah, well, it's the thing. It's got to give clarity and that's what we want. That's what people want. People don't want to be, you know, mollycold. They just want to be told, what do you want? And then I can do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just tell me what want and I'll do it. That's what you pay me for. I don't need all this other crap to make me feel good. Just tell me what you want and I'll do it. I may not agree with you, but that's my job. We'll have a chat about it, but I've got to do it.

Alex (54:54)
Yes. Yeah, 100%. 100%.

You

Mike Jones (55:12)
Yeah, I get it. I've absolutely loved this conversation and unfortunately, if it wasn't for time, because I know you've probably got other things you need to do today. Otherwise, I'll just keep you on here all day because I think we could just keep going. Yeah, yeah, yeah, pretty much. Yeah. But the rules are right. But ⁓ just a final question. What would you like the listeners to...

Alex (55:25)
Violently agreeing.

Yeah, love it.

Mike Jones (55:39)
go away and think about from this episode.

Alex (55:42)
think that the thing that I find myself just these days repeating more than anything is the idea of like ending with the customer, not starting with the customer. Actually, I think it's actually a Rick Rubin quote as well. He obviously meant it in a different context, but where he said the audience comes last. it's, and I just think it's the...

Mike Jones (55:51)
Hmm.

Alex (56:04)
The people are really bad at strategy, but most of the reasons that people are bad at strategy is just because they don't try and they don't know about it. So it's a question of them not having a lot of...

It's a question of them just not having the know-how. That's fine and that's completely forgivable. And I actually don't think that's really, and that's not really that big a deal and that's quite easy to overcome. The thing that is harder to overcome are behaviors that people have or beliefs people have, which are actually actively quite destructive. Was it a Mark Twain quote? Did he say, it's not the things you don't know that kill you, it's the things that you think are true, but are not, or he has a better way of saying it, but it's that. And it's this kind of like,

Mike Jones (56:37)
Hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it, yeah.

Alex (56:49)
And it's this over obsession with the customer and thinking that like.

If we just figure out what they want and give it to them, then everything's going to work out. And then of course you just can't, and then you've run into the issue that you cannot find anything that they want, which they, which they aren't already being given. And then you're like, what do I do now? And I think this is the brick wall that most businesses run up against when they try and do strategy. So how about just parking them for a minute and actually just playing the game differently and actually thinking on that industry wide level and thinking about.

creating something new and creating something which is contrarian to the norms of your industry and then when you've done that and you've actually got some bloody ideas for once in your life

then you can ask the question of whether the customer would like it. is the drum that I've been beating and which I tell you what people really do not like this message it's the one thing that I say that people

that gets people's backs up. So it must be the right thing to say.

Mike Jones (57:52)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. I get it. Yeah. I, I wrote something not long ago called when, when marketing hijack strategy. And I got quite a visceral response to that. so yeah, so you must know it's true, but now it's been an absolute pleasure. Alex. ⁓ I've really enjoyed this. ⁓ but if you, you've enjoyed it as well as a listener, please like and share and share to your network so they can get the value from, Alex's wise words.

Alex (58:04)
Interesting, very interesting. ⁓

Mike Jones (58:20)
But yeah, it's pleasure and I look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you very much, Alex.

Alex (58:24)
Cheers, mate, bye.