You sit in a conference room. Presentations flash by. Growth targets. New hires. Customer experience improvements. Plant expansions. Everyone nods. The plan looks solid. But here is the thing. You just spent three hours on planning. Not strategy. Most organizations confuse the two. They call it strategic planning and assume the label makes it so. It does not. What you end up with is a list of activities that sound good but lack a coherent theory of how you will actually win.

Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management, puts it plainly. Most strategic planning in business has nothing to do with strategy. You get a compilation of departmental wish lists. Manufacturing wants a new plant. Marketing wants a brand launch. HR wants talent development programs. All reasonable. All disconnected.

Planning feels comfortable because you control it. You decide how many people to hire. How much inventory to buy. Which software to purchase. These choices involve resources within your grasp. You allocate budgets. You set timelines. You check boxes.

Strategy operates differently. Strategy makes choices about competitive outcomes you wish to achieve. It specifies which playing field you compete on and how you will outperform everyone else on that field. The uncomfortable part? You do not control customers. You do not control competitors. You are making bets on things outside your direct influence.

Think about what a real strategy requires. You need a theory. Not just goals. A theory. Here is why we should compete in this market instead of that one. Here is how we will serve customers better than anyone else. Here is what must be true for this approach to work. The theory has to be coherent. It has to be doable. You have to translate it into specific actions.

Planning skips all that. Planning does not require coherence. You can list ten initiatives that pull in different directions. Maybe they all make some sense individually. But collectively? They do not add up to winning anything.

Consider Southwest Airlines. While competitors focused on expanding routes and fleet sizes, Southwest developed a different game. They chose point-to-point routes instead of hub-and-spoke systems. They flew into secondary airports with lower costs and faster turnarounds. They operated only Boeing 737s, which meant their mechanics specialized in one aircraft type and parts inventory stayed simple. They made trade-offs. No assigned seating. No free meals. No interline baggage transfers. Customers expected these things. Southwest said no.

Why would a company deliberately disappoint customer expectations? Because they had a strategy. Every choice supported their theory of winning through cost leadership. The 30-minute turnaround time? That was not an operational goal. That was a strategic necessity that required secondary airports plus employees who performed multiple functions. The direct sales through their website? That eliminated commissions to travel agents and supported low fares.

Each piece fit together. Michael Porter calls this forging fit among activities. You perform activities differently than rivals do. You define your position. You make trade-offs. You create a system where each choice reinforces the others. Planning rarely achieves this kind of integration. You might plan to improve customer service. And cut costs. And enter new markets. And upgrade technology. These goals might conflict. They probably do. But planning does not force you to choose.

Strategy forces choices. Hard ones. You cannot be everything to everyone. If you try, you end up stuck in the middle. Not the lowest cost. Not the most differentiated. Just average. Maybe worse than average because your activities work against each other instead of reinforcing each other.

Here is where organizations get tripped up. Research shows that 60 to 90 percent of strategies fail in execution. People blame poor implementation. Weak leadership. Insufficient resources. Cultural resistance.

Perhaps the real problem starts earlier. What if the failure is not in execution? What if you never had a strategy to execute in the first place?

When you start with planning instead of strategy, you create a gap. You have high-level goals. You have departmental initiatives. You have budgets and timelines. What you lack is the connective tissue. The theory of winning. The integrated set of choices that actually positions you somewhere specific. Different departments interpret vague objectives in different ways. Marketing pursues one approach. Sales pursues another. Product development goes a third direction. Everyone works hard. Everyone executes their plans. Nothing comes together. Roger Martin suggests a different approach. Start with the theory. Lay out the logic. What must be true for this to work? Then go do it. Watch. Adjust as you learn.

This feels less comfortable than planning. You are accepting uncertainty. You are making bets. You might be wrong. But here is the alternative. If you plan, you almost guarantee losing. If you do strategy, you give yourself the best possible chance of winning.

So next time you sit in that conference room, ask different questions. Not what will we do. But where will we play and how will we win there. Not what resources will we spend. But what trade-offs will we make. Not whether each initiative sounds good in isolation. But whether they form a coherent system. The list of activities might shrink. That is probably a good sign. Strategy is not about doing more things. Strategy is about making choices that position you to win against actual competitors serving actual customers in actual markets.

Your plan might look less comprehensive. It might feel riskier. It should. Because strategy requires committing to a specific path and accepting that other paths must be abandoned. But at least you will know what you are trying to achieve. And why you think it will work. And how all the pieces fit together.

That is strategy. Everything else is just a wish list with better formatting.