Focus Over Compromise

[Good strategies] emphasize focus over compromise. They focus on one aspect of the situation, not trying to be all things to all people.
—Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt

A good strategy is single-minded. The whole point of a strategy is to focus your time and money so that you can create leverage to achieve an outcome.

Rumelt puts it this way in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy:

A good strategy draws power from focusing minds, energy, and action. That focus, channeled at the right moment onto a pivotal objective, can produce a cascade of favorable outcomes... Finding such crucial pivot points and concentrating force on them is the secret of strategic leverage.

A good strategy must have one, and only one, priority. A strategy should be a sentence, not a checklist.

One form of bad strategy is a compromise written by a committee to appease too many stakeholders.

A Wall Street Journal op-ed (h/t The Grumpy Economist) highlights this issue in an EV charging project.

Grant applicants are evaluated on whether they use project labor agreements, whether they use a “Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool,” and whether they give priority to “minority-owned businesses” for contracts and “people of color” for hiring. The administration previously exempted EV chargers from some of the infrastructure bill’s “Buy America” requirements. But as of this month, newly installed federally funded chargers must be made domestically. As the administration says, the Buy America rules will ensure “that the clean energy transition is powered by American manufacturing and good-paying union jobs.”

That's not a strategy. That's a list of requirements that will make achieving the goal impossible.

What if the best way to have more EV chargers is to buy chargers made abroad? Is installing more chargers or making them domestically more important? What if buying abroad made the project faster and cheaper? Does that matter?

If you run into these questions of prioritization, your strategy isn't focused. Instead, you have a compromise.

If everyone gets a say, you won't have a strategy.