A strategy is built through explicit choices. Yet companies can spend more time reviewing plans than deciding what the business will refuse.
Expert opinion by Raluca Ioana Man, Founder of RSEVEN.
Opinions expressed by contributors are their own.
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Every company says they have a strategy. Ask to see it, and you will be shown a document. The existence of a document does not necessarily mean the company has made the decisions that constitute a strategy. Ask whom it serves, who it refuses, why a customer would choose them over the firm next door, and what it charges for that difference, and the room usually goes quiet.
That silence is the subject of this article.
Leaders do not lack intelligence or effort; the companies I advise are full of both. But the machinery of modern management makes it remarkably easy to stay busy without deciding anything. Budgets get approved. Targets set. Plans presented and applauded. And the questions that could change the company’s position remain politely unasked, year after year.
Strategy Is A Short List Of Decisions
Strip away the vocabulary, and strategy is actually small. It is a handful of explicit choices around where the company competes, whom it serves best, what work it refuses, how it earns its margin, and what it is prepared to give up so that the rest can be true. Everything else, including the plans, the initiatives, the KPIs, is a consequence of strategy rather than strategy itself.
The test of whether those choices exist is not in the quality of the document. It is whether those choices have owners, dates, and costs. A decision that cost nothing may be only a preference. A position that nobody in the room debated over may have emerged by default. And much of what passes for strategy is that accumulation of defaults, dressed in the language of intent.
This is not necessarily carelessness. Deciding is uncomfortable in a way that planning is not. A plan allocates work; a decision distributes loss. A client’s category gets refused. A pet project gets stopped. An explanation of why customers buy may be contradicted by the evidence. It is entirely rational for a leadership team to prefer the document to the decision, until the market decides for them on worse terms.
Who Is This Article Is Written For
I write from Cyprus, and the following numbers are worth highlighting because they frame the argument. According to the European Commission’s 2025 SME country fact sheet, SMEs make up 99.8% of enterprises in Cyprus, employ 81.8% of the workforce, and produce 78.8% of value added in the non-financial business sector. Microenterprises, defined as firms with up to nine employed persons, account for 92.3% of enterprises in the sector.
In this economy, strategy is rarely a department. There is no strategy office, often no formal board, and rarely a marketing function to hide behind. Strategy is whatever the owner decides or fails to decide. That is not a weakness of small economies; it is their honesty. In a large corporation, an undecided strategy can hide inside process for years. In an owner-led firm, it can show up in the bank account within a few quarters.
I write for the people in whom decision and consequence meet: owners, founders, executives, and board members, in Cyprus and anywhere else companies are led by people who cannot delegate the outcome. If you sit on a board, treat this as an agenda. If you run a company, use it as a mirror.
The Ground Rules
Two disciplines run through my work, and I hold myself to them as strictly as I ask my clients to.
First, evidence over conviction. Every claim about a market, a customer, or a competitor should survive contact with something from outside the room: a number, a lost deal, a customer’s own words. Internal certainty is not evidence; it is usually the thing under test.
Second, discomfort as information. In strategy work, the question a leadership team most wants to skip is almost always the one that matters. When you notice resistance, in your team or in yourself, treat it as data about where the undecided decisions live.
Here is the first question, and it belongs on your boardroom table this month: What has our leadership team explicitly decided in the last twelve months that has cost us something?
If the answer is a long silence, put the question on the agenda again. Do not replace it with another review of budgets, targets, and plans.
About the author: Raluca Ioana Man is a business strategist, board advisor, and the founder of RSEVEN, a strategic advisory firm based in Cyprus.
