February 2, 2026
Hi everyone,
Ask three direct reports to name your top strategic priority this quarter.
If you get three different answers (or vague versions of the same platitude) your strategy is most certainly too complex.
A strategy that doesn't easily fit in someone's head won’t have the power to guide what they do.
But here’s the thing, a simple one-page document can do the trick.
What a one-page strategy looks like
A.G. Lafley (former P&G CEO) and Roger Martin built a simple frame:
"Where to play" – the customers, markets, and problems you'll focus on.
"How to win" – the edge you're betting on to outperform in those areas.
Most strategy documents are far too long and complex. They include lots of words, but skip the hard choices. The value of one page is what it forces you to leave out.
How to build yours
Your strategy can fit on a single page if you follow five simple steps.
Step 1: Write a winning aspiration in plain language. What does “winning” look like, and by when.
Step 2: Define where you play with specifics. Which customers, which use cases, which geographies, which channels, which categories. “SMB e-commerce retailers struggling with abandoned carts” beats “all companies in need of payment processing innovation.”
Step 3: Define how you win in that space. Finish the sentence: “We win because ____.” This is your advantage, not your ambition.
Step 4: List the few capabilities you must be great at to win in this way. These are not generic strengths. They are the capabilities you will invest in and protect.
Step 5: Add the management system: 12-month targets plus a cadence to review them. Who owns what, what you measure, and how often you look at it.
Then, add a short “we will not do” list as guardrails. These stop the slow creep of yes.
If you’d like to read more on how to write your one page strategy, this is an interview with Roger Martin, and it includes some concrete examples as well.
Try this today
Pull out your strategy deck and force it into a single table: where we play, how we win, key bets, won't do, 12-month targets. Then get your leadership team involved and sanity check the simplified view.
Or if you don’t have a strategy deck - perhaps precisely because you thought making a deck was too complex - then begin crafting your strategy on a single page with the steps above!
Go deeper
👉 Harvard Business Review: Can you say what your strategy is? – why most executives can't articulate their own strategy.
👉 Playing to Win (Lafley & Martin) (this is the original "where to play / how to win" framework)
👉 Inc. Magazine: Replace your 50-slide deck with one page – why simplicity speeds execution.
Coming up tomorrow
We'll look at how to build an initiative kill list. Adding priorities is easy. But the essence of great strategy is more about choosing what you won’t do, rather than what you will do. Tomorrow we’ll help you get there.
That's it for today.
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