Reflections on the Unseen Power of Strategy, Pt. 2

Navigating Oceans of Possibility

In part 1, I reflected on how passively accepting predicted futures and believing they’re inevitable quietly recruits us into creating futures we never chose.

In part 2, I go deeper. I flesh out why in a world of turbulent human activity, competing intentions and unseen agendas, the need for strategy arises from a simple truth: if we aren’t consciously charting our own path, we’re doing it for someone else. Do you actually want what they want?

We also need to be careful about what we believe in and what we do, because what people come to believe and do is often what an unseen strategy has quietly made reasonable.

Power and the Need to Direct Your Course

Strategy isn’t just a luxury. It’s a necessity.

It’s futile to have all the faculties of mind and body, wealth, resources and intention, without the power to direct your path and obtain your cherished desires.

In a world of all sorts–people, motivations and activities, in this turbulent ocean we each seek to cross, the passive are sunk, the powerless marooned, and the overly virtuous are taken for a ride.

Here’s where intelligence that’s wise, innocence that’s shrewd, and power built from craft, harness the winds and currents to navigate the gales, to arrive at your treasured shore.

The Struggle: Purpose And Resistance

In 1907, Emanuel Lasker, the record-holding German world chess champion and mathematician, wrote:“A struggle arises always when something that has life desires to attain a purpose against resistance.”

Lasker was pointing to a timeless truth: that in a world of constant change, conflicting and competing motivations and activities, experiencing resistance to purpose isn’t an exception; it’s the nature of the environment.

That struggle is familiar to anyone running a business. You have a clear purpose: to earn a living through your trade, satisfy your intellect or curiosity, or to help people. Ultimately, you want to run a viable venture and have enough time and money to enjoy a satisfying life outside of work.

However, unexpected events and circumstances, day-to-day pressures and other disruptions interfere. Clients take up more time. Staff leave. Supply chains break. Demand fluctuates.

Over time, these pressures can overwhelm, drag you down, and wear you out. No single fix–marketing, sales, automation, capital or new staff can resolve it all.

It's not a fault or a failure. It's the nature of dynamic living systems with self-motivated actors. It’s life.

Business is Life

You see, business is life, and life is the greatest venture.

"Business is Life" sums up its role as a fundamental part of human existence, tied to our needs and aspirations. The word itself across many languages is about human activity, survival, and connection. It’s how we provide for ourselves and others, engage with the world, and turn our efforts into value.

Whether through employment or entrepreneurship, business is how we pursue our version of the good life. It is inseparable from the totality of life. Your business cannot isolate itself from the intrigues of the world around it. Nor can strategy be separated from the machinations of life. To do so renders strategy illusory, impotent, and incapable of harnessing the forces around it to exploit opportunities and navigate challenges.

When strategy is narrowed to fit industry boundaries and standardised frameworks, we lose a rich and multidimensional art that once drew from philosophy, spirituality, psychology and cultural wisdom. Modern strategy has become highly technical, overly rational, narrowly focused and competitively reductive in a way that sidelines broader ways of thinking. It’s lost its connection to logic, magic, art and science. It’s lost its spark and its power for “the small”.

The implication of this is handicap, disadvantage, domination, and eventually drudgery. This erosion of strategic capacity benefits those who quietly play by different rules. Rules are not neutral; they are subjective boundaries drawn to protect turf. They must be examined, pruned, or even overturned—because left unchecked, they grow like hedges, crowding out the sun and choking what could thrive.

Why Strategy for the Small Must Be Different

Nature teaches us that the big and the small are not alike. They do not play by the same rules. To do so is death.

In business, as in life, the bigger you are, the more you must consume to survive. Left unchecked, the big overgrow, invade, out-consume, and starve out the rest. It’s not personal. It’s structural.

Meanwhile, the kind of strategy typically offered to SMEs is a carousel of repetitive tactics, a perpetual loop of marketing campaigns, funnels, content, social media hacks, and automation. It creates the illusion of progress, but rarely delivers lasting advantage. It’s the visible, predictable path, easily read, easily copied, and easily outmaneuvered by those who control the platforms, networks, supply chains and factories.

Large corporations and platform giants aren’t playing that same game. Instead of drowning themselves in short-lived tactical plays, they shape and dominate flows. They create the conditions others move within. They build ecosystems of partners, resources and capabilities that generate visibility, battlefield dominance and control.

They don't just play the game; they quietly redraw the map.

That is precisely why SMEs must take a breath and look at the world they’re operating in. Is this how you envisaged doing business? Does your approach to strategy reflect the reality of that world? Intelligence is the ability to navigate the realities of your environment and thrive in it. An idealised fantasy view cannot help.

Generalised and regurgitated playbooks published by institutions or influencers funded by large corporations rarely serve the small. Strategy for the small must be different. Not a derivative. Not diluted.

It must be audacious craft, not reckless theatre. Quiet, not noisy. Unique, not templated.

Toward Strategic Realism

Strategy for the small must be rooted in truth: that business is life, and strategy is not just a plan, not just action, but an accumulation of power. Power to shape, power to respond, power to outmanoeuvre, and to build something that can thrive in an unfair world.

To achieve this, we’re not talking about unethical behaviour (tongue firmly in cheek), but strategic design. Holistic ingenuity, including counterintuitive and asymmetric approaches, designed to suit the context, held extremely close and even disguised. There are more business infiltrations and silent disruptions than most imagine. It’s not always brute force. Often, it’s velvet-gloved, golden-handshake disruption by venture-backed ecosystems absorbing the small under the promise of scale, until independence is lost and they are either replaced or repurposed.

For SMEs, the right strategy doesn’t help you compete in a rigged arena, it shifts the field of play entirely.

We rarely land exactly where we aim. That's why strategy must aim beyond mere survival or competitiveness. It must stretch toward transformation. The vision must exceed the goal, because setbacks, resistance, and drift are part of the journey.

As the old proverb says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” But perhaps even more true is this: where the vision is too small, the motivation falls short. Strategy, then, must lift our sights and expand the field of possibility, not just for survival, but for creating something extraordinary an enduring.

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 In the next article, I’ll trace the outline of the current structural conditions shaping the SMe landscape and the binary options business owners face if current patterns and passive compliance continue. From there, we’ll move towards a vision for reclaiming lost ground and reshaping conditions.

There is nothing new under the sun, but knowledge and understanding have never been evenly distributed.