Strategic Planning

Choose Few Strategic Goals and Decide Where Not to Compete

Many strategic plans are impressive documents that go nowhere. They’re packed with initiatives, charts, and buzzwords – but on the ground, people are still unclear about what really matters. The 80/20 Rule explains why: a small number of strategic choices drive most of your results, while the rest create noise.

Applying the Pareto Principle to strategic planning means ruthlessly focusing on the 20% of goals, markets, products, and capabilities that will deliver 80% of your impact. Instead of a bloated plan, you get a clear, living strategy that actually guides decisions.

Why Most Strategic Plans Fail in Practice

Common failure patterns in strategy look suspiciously 80/20:

• Too many priorities – nothing is truly prioritized.
• Vague goals disconnected from daily work.
• Strategies that don’t make clear trade‑offs (“we’ll be the cheapest and the most premium!”).
• Plans created once a year and then forgotten.

Meanwhile, organizations that execute well often do fewer things – but with far greater alignment and intensity. They pick a small set of strategic bets and build everything else around them.

80/20 Step #1: Choose a Small Number of Strategic Goals

The first 20% of a good strategy is answering, “What are we really trying to achieve?” – not in 15 bullet points, but in a short list of clear, measurable outcomes. These become your true north.

• Limit yourself to 3–5 strategic goals for a given time horizon (e.g., 1–3 years).
• Ensure they are specific: revenue targets, market share in a segment, a key product launch, a customer satisfaction metric, cost reductions, etc.
• Ask, “If we achieved only these, would this period be a success?” If not, refine.
• Real‑life example: A B2B company moved from a slide full of “strategic pillars” to three: dominate one vertical, increase net revenue retention to 120%, and launch a new self‑service product line. That focus clarified trade‑offs across the whole organization.

8020 move: Cut your strategic goal list until you feel slightly uncomfortable – like you might be leaving something out. That’s usually the point where real focus begins.

80/20 Step #2: Decide Where You Will Not Compete

Strategy is as much about choosing what not to do as what to do. The 80/20 Rule reminds you that you don’t need to win everywhere; you need to win decisively in a few places that matter most.

• Clarify which customer segments, geographies, or product lines you will focus on – and which you will deliberately de‑prioritize or exit.
• Be explicit about trade‑offs: “We will prioritize depth in niche X over breadth across all sectors.”
• Real‑life example: A SaaS startup tried to serve multiple industries. After analyzing revenue and churn, they found that 70% of growth and durability came from one vertical. They decided to focus their roadmap, marketing, and sales almost entirely on that sector, letting others follow opportunistically. Growth accelerated because effort was no longer scattered.

8020 move: List the markets and offerings where you’re spending energy. Highlight the few that contribute most to growth or strategic advantage, and write down at least one area where you’ll consciously pull back.

80/20 Step #3: Align Projects and Resources with Your Vital Few Goals

Even the best strategy fails if budgets, projects, and people’s time don’t match it. This is where 80/20 can be blunt: most organizations have too many initiatives. A minority drive most of the value; the rest dilute focus.

• Create an initiative inventory: list current and proposed projects.
• For each, ask: “Which strategic goal does this directly support?”
• Use a simple impact/effort lens to identify high‑impact, feasible projects and low‑impact distractions.
• Reallocate resources (money, people, attention) from lower‑value initiatives to the top 10–20% that matter most.
• Real‑life example: A non‑profit had over 30 active “strategic initiatives.” After mapping them to goals, they realized 6 programs generated most of their outcomes and donations. They made the tough call to pause or sunset several smaller efforts and reinvest in the core. Impact and staff morale both improved.

8020 move: Require that every major project explicitly reference the strategy: which goal it supports, how it will be measured, and what will be deprioritized to make room. If that can’t be answered, it’s probably not truly strategic.

80/20 Step #4: Communicate Strategy in Plain Language, Often

Many employees can’t explain their organization’s strategy beyond generic phrases. That’s a sign the plan lives on slides, not in decisions. An 80/20 approach to strategic communication focuses on a few simple, repeated messages rather than dense documents.

• Boil your strategy down to a short narrative: where you’re playing, how you’re winning, and what must change.
• Use consistent language across leadership, not competing slogans.
• Reinforce it regularly in town halls, team meetings, and performance reviews by linking decisions back to it.
• Real‑life example: A CEO began every quarterly meeting with the same three strategic priorities, with concrete progress updates and stories. Over time, people across levels could recite them and use them to justify local decisions. Strategy became a shared vocabulary, not a one‑off announcement.

8020 move: Ask a random sample of managers or team members, “What are our top 3 strategic priorities right now?” If you get different answers, focus communication efforts there before adding new initiatives.

80/20 Step #5: Review and Adjust Strategy with a Few Key Metrics

Strategy isn’t set‑and‑forget. But regular review doesn’t mean tracking dozens of KPIs. An 80/20 approach chooses a short list of indicators that reflect whether your strategy is working.

• Select 5–10 key metrics tied directly to your strategic goals (e.g., revenue by target segment, net retention, product adoption, cost metrics).
• Review them on a fixed cadence (monthly, quarterly) with leadership.
• Use changes in those metrics to trigger deeper investigation and possible course corrections.
• Real‑life example: A company tracking its push into a new market watched a handful of numbers: pipeline size in that segment, conversion rates, and churn. When churn stayed high despite good acquisition, they dug deeper and realized the product lacked one critical feature for that segment. Fixing it turned the strategy from “struggling” to “successful.”

8020 move: Resist the urge to add more and more metrics. Focus on a concise dashboard tied directly to your objectives, and be willing to rethink bets if those vital numbers don’t move.

Personal Strategic Planning the 80/20 Way

You can apply the same thinking to your own life and career. Instead of vague resolutions, define a few key areas where you want to win (health, relationships, career, learning) and pick 1–3 high‑leverage goals in each. Then ask:

• What 20% of actions would move me 80% closer to these goals?
• What should I stop doing to make space for them?
• Real‑life example: Instead of a long list of self‑improvement goals, Mia chose three strategic focuses for the year: deepen her design skills, improve her health via consistent sleep and exercise, and strengthen two close friendships. She built her monthly plans around those, saying no to many lesser opportunities. A year later, she’d advanced more than in any previous “busy” year filled with unfocused activity.

Less Plan, More Strategy

Strategic planning doesn’t need to produce a gigantic document. It needs to produce clarity and focus that shape real decisions. The 80/20 Rule helps you get there: choose a small number of truly important goals, decide where not to play, align projects and resources with those bets, communicate them simply and repeatedly, and adjust based on a few meaningful signals.

Do that, and your “strategy” stops being a once‑a‑year ritual and becomes a daily guide for how you and your organization spend your finite time, money, and attention – on the 20% that actually moves the needle.