Insights - Juho Joensuu

We’ve mystified strategy. Made it the domain of consultants, boardrooms, and MBAs. But if you strip away the jargon, strategy becomes something deeply human.

Strategy, at its core, is making intentional, consequential choices under constraints.

That’s it.

You face strategy questions every day, whether you recognize them as such or not.

Examples:

• A student preparing for an exam has a strategy. She can’t study everything in the time available. She must choose: which topics matter most? Which study methods will be most effective? How does she allocate limited time across competing subjects? These are strategic choices.
• An athlete preparing for competition has a strategy. Which opponent weaknesses to exploit? Which of your own strengths to emphasize? How to pace yourself? Where to invest training time? Strategy in action.
• A job seeker has a strategy. Which companies to pursue? What kind of role to target? How to position your experience? Where to compromise and where to hold firm? That’s strategy.
• Even in daily sales conversations, you’re making strategic choices. How to approach this particular client? What to emphasize based on their context? When to push and when to listen? Strategy.

What makes these strategic rather than just decisions?

They involve trade-offs.

You can’t do everything, so you must choose. The student who tries to study everything equally learns nothing deeply. The athlete who trains everything equally masters nothing. Strategy is the art of choosing what not to do.

They require coordination across time.

The choice you make today affects what’s possible tomorrow. Your job search strategy today shapes what opportunities you’ll have next year. These aren’t isolated decisions. They’re sequenced choices building toward something.

They happen in context.

• The student’s strategy depends on what the test will cover and how much time they have.
• The athlete’s strategy depends on the opponent, the location, and the expected climate.
• The job seeker’s strategy depends on the market, their likes and dislikes. You’re not choosing in a vacuum. You’re responding to an environment that pushes back and balancing different options.

They have consequences.

Get it wrong, and you fail the test, lose the game, don’t get the job. The stakes make the choice strategic.

Now, not every choice is strategic. What you eat for breakfast usually isn’t. Which email you answer first probably isn’t. These are decisions, but they lack the trade-offs, temporal coordination, contextual awareness, and consequences that define strategy.

What does this mean in business setting?

When we talk about business strategy specifically, we’re asking: whom do we serve, how do we serve them, what value do we create, how do we deliver that value, and what do we not do in order to do these things well?

But the underlying principle, making consequential choices under constraint in context over time, applies everywhere.

This matters because we’ve made strategy seem inaccessible. Something you need special training for. Something reserved for senior people in important roles and big paychecks.

But strategic thinking is a transferable skill. The student who learns to make strategic trade-offs in studying develops muscles that apply to business, relationships, career planning, and everything else.

The problem isn’t that people can’t think strategically. It’s that we’ve convinced them strategy is something foreign to their experience.

It’s not.

You already make strategic choices. You already weigh trade-offs, consider context, coordinate across time, and accept consequences.

The question is whether you do it deliberately or accidentally. Whether you make choices with clear logic or vague intuition. Whether you learn from the outcomes or just repeat patterns.

Good strategy requires three elements

The Why

A theory of winning. Given this context and these constraints, why do we expect these choices help us succeed?

The What

Committed choices. What will you do? What will you not do? What trade-offs are you accepting?

The How

An execution path. How will these choices actually be implemented? Is it feasible?

Miss any piece, and you’re not doing strategy. You’re wishing, planning, or drifting.

So what is strategy?

It’s not exclusive. It’s not reserved for executives or consultants.

It’s the human work of making intentional and consequential choices under constraint, with clear logic, in context, over time.

You’re already doing it. The question is whether you’re doing it intentionally and well.