Only 28% of execs remember their strategy

Hi Everyone,

Could your leadership team, right now, write down the company's top three strategic priorities without comparing notes? In most companies the answer is no, even when the strategy itself is solid.

There's research on exactly this. Across 124 organizations, only 28% of the executives and managers responsible for executing strategy could name three of their company's priorities.

Today we're walking through a three-slide strategic narrative you can build in about 90 minutes.

The same three blocks keep showing up

Whether it's Amazon's six-page memos or the one-page plans used by scaling companies, the same three blocks show up: where we are, where we'll focus, and what success looks like.

Amazon's PR/FAQ process shows why compression works. Teams write narrative memos before any build starts, and weak ideas usually die on the page before anyone spends engineering time on them. Kindle, Prime, and AWS all went through this process. You can't hide vague thinking inside three slides.

What goes on each slide

Slide 1: Where we are. A few honest lines on current performance, what recent data or customer feedback is telling you, and the one tension that makes the rest of the story necessary.

Slide 2: Where we'll focus. The handful of priorities you're committing to, each with an owner. Then the options you considered and rejected, written down so the team doesn't drift back toward them. Ravi Mehta, who built product strategy at Tripadvisor, recommends recording where people "disagreed and committed" in this section.

Slide 3: What success looks like. Measurable goals stated as from-here-to-there (e.g., "MRR from $X to $Y"), a few decision rules that help teams choose without escalating, and a review cadence: monthly at leadership, quarterly at all-hands.

The priorities or goals you rejected, the "kill list", on Slide 2 matter more than they first seem. Trying to run six or more major initiatives at once usually means none of them get done well. Making "no" visible matters just as much as making "yes" clear.

Block 90 minutes with your leadership team and draft the three slides in order, starting with where you are. Expect the kill list to take the most discussion.

Review quarterly, not annually

Organizations that review goals quarterly see roughly 3x better improvement in performance and retention than annual reviews. Yet only about 6% of companies revisit goals that often.

The three-slide narrative works best as something people actually use, reviewed monthly by leadership and updated quarterly, not filed away after an offsite.

One more finding from the MIT Sloan research: more town halls didn't improve recall. What mattered was managers explaining priorities in the context of their team's work. Give your managers the three slides and ask them to translate each one for their people.

Try this today

Take the next real priority you're considering and see how it fits across the three slides: where you are now, what you've chosen to focus on (and rule out), and what success looks like in numbers. If it doesn't feel like a robust priority, the problem is usually that one part of the strategy hasn't been defined clearly enough yet.

If you're debating whether a project fits your priorities, Slide 2 needs work. If you're arguing about what success looks like, Slide 3 is too vague. If people disagree on why the initiative matters in the first place, Slide 1 isn't grounded enough in reality. Fix that slide first.

Go deeper

👉 MIT Sloan Management Review: No One Knows Your Strategy — The study behind the 28% stat, plus practical recommendations for closing the alignment gap.

👉 First Round Review: Set Non-Goals and Build a Product Strategy Stack — Ravi Mehta's full framework for structuring strategy at the product level, with Tripadvisor examples.

👉 Six Pager Memo: Amazon Six-Pager Template — A section-by-section breakdown of the memo format Amazon uses instead of slide decks.

👉 Growth Institute: One-Page Strategic Plan — How the OPSP works as a living alignment tool for scaling companies.

Coming up on Monday

On Monday, we're looking at how "if-then" plans protect your thinking under pressure and how to write them in about two minutes.

Have a great weekend!

P.S. How many slides is your current strategy deck?