I cringe at times when I look at acquisition due diligence, thick competitive analysis, and pages long strategy power points. Not because of any bureaucracy or over analytical nature of such things. One of my earliest lessons, a company where we essentially banned power point presentations was that if you can’t whiteboard your strategy in a convincing way in about 2 minutes, you aren’t there yet.

Easily the most successful strategies I have seen play out well could in a few short strokes on the whiteboard list the premise for the product, the key success factor(s), what about it was important to the customer, and the sustainable advantage you had if implemented well.

Parts of that whiteboard were not perfect or even incorrect, but every strategy is wrong at some level because you haven’t executed on it. What that whiteboarding exercise does give you is the ability to have a focused discussion about the assumptions behind what you have put on the board and what has to be true in order for that strategy to be successful.

Last, for most companies that operate at scale of any kind, decentralized management is necessary. For that to be effective, your leaders must understand deeply the context of the strategy, and as they align and execute on it, be able to shape it into the true strategy; the one that can be executed. Those same leaders need to whiteboard their strategy to their people, until they can, you still have work to do and context to build.