The Trap of Trying To Do Everything
A few years ago, I was sitting across from a CEO who had just wrapped up his annual planning session. His team had worked hard; they had goals everywhere, color-coded spreadsheets, sticky notes on whiteboards, a long list of initiatives. He leaned back and said, “Patrick, I feel like we’re doing everything. And yet, I feel like we’re going nowhere.”
I’ve heard some version of that sentence more times than I can count.
Having a lot of goals is not the same as having the right goals. Busyness is not progressing, and when you try to move everything at once, you often end up moving nothing at all.
That’s where Winning Moves come in.
What Is a Winning Move?
A Winning Move is not an incremental improvement. It’s not a tweak to a process or a modest bump in efficiency. A Winning Move is a strategic bet, a 3-to-5-year initiative with the genuine potential to double your revenue.
I wrote about this in depth in Chapter 2 of my book Rhythm: How to Achieve Breakthrough Execution and Accelerate Growth. The idea is simple: rather than spreading your energy across dozens of priorities, you identify 2-3 big moves that could fundamentally change the trajectory of your business. These are the ideas that make your team’s eyes light up: a new market, a new product line, a new model that unlocks growth you can’t achieve by just running your existing business harder.
The key is to be selective. Most companies I work with start out thinking they have 6, 7, maybe 8 potential Winning Moves. But you can’t execute them all well. The discipline is to evaluate each idea honestly: What’s the revenue impact? Does our team have the capability to actually execute this? Two or three strong Winning Moves, properly resourced and relentlessly executed, will outperform a list of ten every single time.
Setting Goals That Actually Move the Needle
Here’s where goal-setting gets interesting. Most people approach goals from the bottom up; they look at what they did last year and add a percentage. That’s operational thinking, not strategic thinking.
Winning Moves require you to flip the lens. You start with the future you want to create, your BHAG, your 3-to-5-year targets, and then work backward. What would have to be true to get there? What moves would have to succeed? That’s how you set goals that are genuinely connected to strategy, not just numbers pulled from last year’s actuals.
This is the heart of the Think Plan Do® framework: Think about where you want to go, Plan the moves that will get you there, and Do the work with accountability and rhythm.
One of the most powerful things you can do during your Annual Planning session is to carve out dedicated time, at least a full day, for strategic thinking. Not just reviewing last year’s numbers or allocating budget, but genuinely asking: What are the 2-3 moves that could change everything?
Testing Your Assumptions Before You’re All-In
One mistake I see often is treating a Winning Move like a finished strategy from day one. It’s not; it’s a hypothesis.
When you first identify a potential Winning Move, you’re really saying, “We believe this could double our revenue if these assumptions are true.” Your job in year one is to test those assumptions, to gather data, run small experiments, talk to customers, and find out if the premise holds up. This is why the Winning Moves process includes explicit assumption tracking. You’re not committing to a 3-year execution plan before you’ve pressure-tested the idea.
I’ve seen companies avoid enormous mistakes, years wasted, capital burned because they built this test-and-learn discipline into their strategic process. And I’ve seen others charge ahead without it, only to discover 18 months in that a core assumption was wrong.
Be curious, be rigorous before you go all-in, and make sure the foundation is solid.
From Strategy to Execution: The Quarterly Bridge
Identifying your Winning Moves is the strategy. Executing them is everything else.
This is where a lot of companies break down. They have a beautiful annual plan, great Winning Moves, clear targets, and then they return to the office on Monday and get back to the urgent. Six months later, nothing has actually moved.
The bridge between your annual strategy and your daily work is the quarterly plan. Every 90 days, your team should ask: What are the 3-5 priorities this quarter that will actually advance our Winning Moves? Who owns each one? How will we know if we’re on track?
Execution Is the Ultimate Competitive Advantage
Over the past two decades, I’ve worked with hundreds of leadership teams, and I’ve noticed a pattern. The companies that grow the fastest aren’t necessarily the ones with the smartest strategies. They’re the ones with the clearest priorities and the discipline to execute them.
Winning Moves force leaders to make choices, they create focus, and align resources to help leadership teams stop chasing dozens of good ideas so they can fully commit to the few initiatives that will create meaningful impact.
If your strategic plan feels more like a wish list than a roadmap, take a step back and ask a simple question:
What are the three to five moves that would most dramatically change the trajectory of our business over the next three to five years?
That’s where strategy becomes actionable.
To help you identify your own Winning Moves, explore our 3-5 Year Strategic Planning resources and learn how high-growth leadership teams create clarity, alignment, and focus around what matters most.
Start here: Winning Moves Strategic Planning Resources
Because growth doesn’t come from doing more things. It comes from making the right moves and executing them well.
—Patrick Thean