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# What strategic decisions look like
- URL: https://www.antoinebuteau.com/what-strategic-decisions-look-like/
- Published: 2020-05-05T04:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-19T00:19:03.000Z
- Description: Strategy means choosing where to play and how to win, then accepting what the company will not pursue. Clear choices create focus, but their value depends on leaders implementing them consistently, even when short-term pressures make compromise tempting.
- Author: Antoine Buteau
- Tags: Strategy

Most companies fall into the [“do-it-all strategy” trap](https://fs.blog/2015/04/six-strategy-traps/?ref=antoinebuteau.com). Failing to make choices, and making everything a priority. The result is underperformance and employees lack of beliefs that their leaders truly want them to act strategically.

For employees strategy can look like a black box. They are thinking: “Leaders have spent more than 3 months to come up with that? I can’t even understand what our strategy means!”

But defining strategy is "simple". Strategy is about making choices. A company must choose to do some things and not others.

In [Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works](https://amzn.to/2WhvyF0?ref=antoinebuteau.com), Roger Martin describes two important decisions that leaders need to make:

- **Where will we play:** Which customer segments, channels, product categories, and geographies do we serve?
- **How we will win:** Do we compete on low cost or differentiation?

The story of [Star Laundry](https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2020/02/04/cleaning-up-how-a-27-year-old-college-dropout-turned-his-late-dads-business-into-a-laundry-service-worth-150-million/?ref=antoinebuteau.com#1766cb0568fc) is indicative of what a good strategic decision looks like.

Yaakoub Hijazi took over his family commercial laundry and dry-cleaning business when his father died. He faced two strategic problems: the business was on the brink of bankruptcy and laundry is a cutthroat business, price-cutting to gain market share is rampant.

To save the business, he first focused on Where to Play decisions:

- **Product categories:** cut the dry-cleaning business.
- **Customer segments and geography:** large and luxury hotels in Manhattan, where occupany rates are high and steady.

These decisions allowed him to decide on How to Win:

- The selling point of Star Laundry is quality, not low cost.

By focusing on quality and on large and luxury hotel it allowed to set rates in the mid-to upper range while maintaining profitability. Furthermore, it protected Star Laundry from pricing pressures and enabled them to create delivery-route efficiencies. The Where to Play and How to Win choices paid off as the business grew to $70 million in revenue.

Hijazi story is a reminder that if you’re going to pursue a strategy, you must be willing to make hard choices and act as if you truly believe in your own strategy. The greatest value of a leader is in ensuring that the strategy is implemented. Executing a strategy takes courage. You must be willing to practice what you preach, when it is convenient and, most importantly, when it is not.

And yes, it means there is often a choice to be made between strategy and short term cash.