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Why strategy driftsโโโand how to fix it
An apocalyptic dilemma for billionaires + why rain smells so good (Issue #391)
Picture a boat on a river: The current carries it forward, it dodges the odd log or rock, and if nobody is steering, the boat is just floating along. Thatโs what Chief Strategy Officer Kevin Novak calls โdriftโโโโan organizationโs slow slide off course often fueled by complacency and overconfidence.
Novak explains that drift moves through four stages: incremental shifts, strategic drift as the environment changes faster than the company can adapt, flux when customers begin looking elsewhere, and finally the point where only radical reinvention can stave off collapse. Drift is caused less by markets than by people, through blind spots, confirmation bias, and the comfort of past success. To prevent it, he emphasizes vigilance: test strategy against outside data, track the right metrics, listen to dissent, invest in research, and stay connected to employees and customers. For Novak, a businessโs resilience depends on curiosity, humility, and the discipline to notice early signs of veering off course.
Strategy advisor Roger Martin offers a complementary cure for the problem Novak diagnoses. In his deeply useful two-part series on how he personally crafts strategy, Martin shares the four steps he uses to craft winning strategies that help organizations avoid drift:
- Create urgency. Confront the cracks in your current strategy. Show that inaction carries greater risk than change, and that facing weaknesses directly gives an organization the drive to improve.
- Define the problem. Specify exactly what needs to change, what success would look like, and which factors are within your control.
- Imagine possibilities. Sketch coherent portraits of how choices could fit together to solve the problem, then test those ideas against analogy, tradeoffs, and anomalies.
- Make the choice. Commit to one path, enforce it consistently, and only revise when conditions truly shift.
Together, these articles sketch the arc from noticing when the current is pulling a business off course to steering decisively toward a more successful destination.
โ Anna Dorn
Recommended reading:
- In Washington, D.C., crime is at a 30-year low, yet FBI, DEA, Park Police, and Homeland Security agents are patrolling the streets. Essayist Lisa Schamess reports on a federal crackdown she calls unnecessary and harmful, pushing unhoused residents out and leaving ordinary people feeling harassed. She contrasts the spectacle of armed agents with the city she has known for forty years: one defined by Black culture, neighborhood trust, and everyday kindness.
- Agatha Christie plotted mysteries in her notebooks. Laini Taylor sketched fantastical worlds in hers. Sue Grafton filled hers with character notes. College English instructor Melissa Pilakowski uses these examples to illustrate four kinds of writersโ notebooks: process journals, daily freewriting pages, โattic journalsโ for playful prompts, and catch-alls that mix notes, lists, and drafts. For her, the only wrong way to keep a writerโs notebook is to leave it blank.
- That earthy, nostalgic scent that rises when summer rain hits dry ground? Itโs called petrichor, and as PhD chemist John Knight, PhD explains, its unique scent originates from plant oils released in heat, geosmin from soil bacteria, and aerosols lifted by raindropsโโโsometimes sharpened by ozone from lightning. Because the smell links directly to memory, even a trace of petrichor can pull you back into summers past, which is what makes it so irresistible.
- Billionaires may fantasize about surviving the apocalypse in fortified bunkers, but author and veteran Benjamin Sledge argues theyโll be the first to fall. Revisiting Douglas Rushkoffโs viral story of elites scheming to control their guards after societal collapse, Sledge explains that special forces veterans have no real loyaltyโโโtheyโll pocket the perks but wonโt protect their bosses when everything falls apart. His conclusion is blunt: loyalty canโt be bought, and the billionaires counting on it will learn that the hard way.
- When New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani posted a video of himself eating rice with his hands, it drew swift backlash. Writer Ninad Kulkarni traces the stigma of eating with your hands to colonial prejudice that equated forks with civility and South Asian traditions with backwardness. For Kulkarni, eating with his hands is hygienic, intimate, and no different than how Americans eat pizza or wingsโโโitโs a connection to culture, memory, and self.
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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Why strategy driftsโโโand how to fix it was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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