What Writing “The Strategy Trap” Taught Me

One thing I didn’t expect from writing The Strategy Trap is how much it would force me to question my own thinking and break down assumptions I didn’t even realize I was carrying.

I’ve been using a lot of the ideas in the book for years. They weren’t new to me. And I knew they worked. I trusted them. But writing is different. You can’t skip steps. You can’t rely on tone or context or “you know what I mean.”

You have to explain things cleanly enough that someone else can actually do something with them. You know, exactly like communicating a strategy to a team that has to act on it.

That’s where I noticed I’d been carrying parts of it in my head for so long that I stopped noticing where I might not have been explaining things fully enough for other people to really understand what I was trying to do.

And that’s a familiar pattern in leadership.

When a strategy lives mostly in a leader’s head, the team doesn’t necessarily push back. They nod. They start working. And then a week later, questions show up. Decisions slow down. Things get escalated that shouldn’t need escalation. 

That confusion leads to friction in execution.

Writing this book tightened my own operating discipline more than I expected. It forced me to be more precise about what matters, what doesn’t, and what good execution actually looks like day to day.

If this book helps other leaders do that same work before their teams pay the price for it, then it’s done what I hoped it would do.