A good strategy cannot be proven ahead of time

To paraphrase Roger Martin, former Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, you cannot prove that a given strategy is going to work out.

A strategy specifies the intended outcome and describes your theory as to why you believe that it can achieve that outcome within the environment you operate in. But because you cannot control how other forces will react, there’s no way to definitively prove it will work.

In essence, with a strategy you’re saying, “Here’s what we believe will happen when we do this. We cannot prove it in advance, but here’s our theory as to why we believe it will work.”

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