Desire isn't a strategy
“Someone wins the lottery every day, doesn’t make it a business plan” - Jay-Z (I think, I can’t find the quote online)
Most of what is presented as “strategy” in most organizations isn’t really a strategy. It’s usually something more like a desire. Sometimes they can be a little mixed together - “build software users love” is *kind of* a strategy, at least it tells you something not to do (build crappy software) but it doesn’t really tell you much about how to do it, or why.
“Get rich” or “Get Promoted and be successful” are the kinds of things you hear people say when you ask them about their goals and plans. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it’s important to realize that those are relatively undifferentiated goals. Something that starts to feel more like a strategy is “specialize in field X so I advance quickly” or “learn about startups and build skills to build something successful”.
Some big companies have obvious strategies. Apple has a strategy of “the hardware and software each differentiate the other”, and this motivates the tactic of both investing in hardware (M1 chips etc) as well as user experiences (design). Amazon has a strategy of ‘take advantage of scale’, which motivated the creation of AWS. And so on…each of those companies also has *goals* but those goals are less differentiated: “get big, make lots of money, be successful in market X”.
In larger organizations, it’s very easy to get into the mindset of “we have to do something, this is something, so let’s do it”. Established organizations and companies have their own momentum, so it’s easy to do something that is available and think that it’s going to have some impact, when, in fact, it doesn’t serve a clear strategy. This often shows up as “strategies” that aren’t actionable, and are really just desires. Remember - if it doesn’t tell you what to do, and not do, if you can’t derive tactics from it, it’s not really a strategy.