Tech Titans: Why Plans Fail and Strategy Doesn't with Seth Godin, Author of This Is Strategy

Seth Godin (0:00)

A lot of people who came up through the ranks moved up because of the T part, the technology part.

And it's easy to imagine that you get better at your job by having a Swiss Army knife and some pliers and solving technical problems. Strategy isn't tactics. Strategy isn't planning. Organizations love planning because they get to celebrate their power. They get to say, we have a plan and we will execute it. But strategy is a philosophy of becoming.

Joel (0:37)

I want to start with, if the title is This Is Strategy, then what is strategy? Can you help define it?

Seth Godin (0:43)

Let's start with what is a CTO because a lot of people who came up through the ranks moved up because of the T part, the technology part. And it's easy to imagine that you get better at your job by having a Swiss Army knife and some pliers and solving technical problems. But I think the T actually stands for teaching. And that the job of the CTO is to teach the organization how technology transforms what they do, who they do it for and how they do it. And we're hesitant to do that because we've been indoctrinated as we move up to an organization to do our job, to follow instructions, not to lead. And a lot of CTOs are simply managers. They use power and authority to tell other people what to do. Leadership is different. Leadership is voluntary. Leadership is, we're going over there. I'm not exactly sure how to get there. But I have some assertions to make, who wants to come with me?

And that gets us to the discussion of strategy. Strategy isn't tactics. Strategy isn't planning. Organizations love planning because they get to celebrate their power. They have to say, we have a plan and we will execute it. But strategy is a philosophy of becoming. Strategy is how we deal with an uncertain future to create the conditions for change to happen. And we're all surrounded by systems, and the CTO knows this better than most, and the systems influence our strategy, and our strategy changes the systems.

How's that for a rant? And we kept making that excuse until nine months ago. And now I think most people agree it's here.

And what I found is the ChatGPT is annoying, and arrogant, and gets in my way. But when I started working with Claude, I discovered that if you use it at what it's good at, it is the biggest leap since the invention of electricity. And my personal experience with that is that every day for at least half an hour, I do not use it to do my writing, because I want people to know my writing is my writing. But for example, I had a 40-page business plan that had been written over five months with six different authors, all asynchronous. And I uploaded it to Claude and I said, please read this, highlight the inconsistencies, and challenge me on five things that don't make sense to you. And in less than 30 seconds, it wrote an MBA-level two-page analysis, and it was right, and it was more right than a typical person would have been.

And what I have found is that if you ask it good questions, giving it a lot of data, it will give you provocative answers that will open the door to you being able to question your own assumptions.

And so what I'm trying to do in the book is say, go ahead and ask Claude about this topic when it relates to you and your business plan. And it will give you a very thoughtful analysis of whether what you say you're doing is what you're actually doing. And it's much easier to have these conversations with an AI than it is with a person. But if we get in the habit, we can start having these conversations with people too.

Joel (4:39)

And so what do you, in your mind, what do you, you said that Claude.AI is really good if you use it for what it's good at. To you, what is Claude really good at?

Seth Godin (4:52)

The thing that I have found the most extraordinary is if I give it a list of four or five or six things, and say, please give me 10 more.

It's just off the charts, off the charts. And that was its contribution to the book, where I would say, here are five elements of something. And it would say, no, you left out these two. And I would think about it and say, yeah, I did. And it's extraordinary to me that something that is basically a magic trick that understands nothing truly can simulate this level of understanding.