Big Ideas, Simple Logic
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In a conference room towering over New York City, Josh Baskin looks confused. The character, played by Tom Hanks in the classic 1988 movie Big, is fidgeting in his chair during a product development meeting where suited corporate leaders unveil a new toy. The team had developed a big idea, one that would leverage multiple market research trends and is designed for toy stardom. One of the executives proudly presents a futuristic skyscraper/transformer hybrid … a toy that turns from a building into a robot.
But Josh interrupts.
He raises his hand and asks the now-famous question:
“What’s fun about that?”
The rationale given is complicated. The logic assumes that more features equal more value.
But Josh’s logic is simpler: “There’s a million robots that turn into something, and this is a building that turns into a robot. What’s fun about playing with a building?”
That single line cuts through pages of research, layers of analysis, and a room full of grown-ups overthinking the obvious. It reminds us of something every strategist knows but too often forgets: The best strategy lives in simple logic.
As someone who has spent years studying the moves of high-performing innovators, what strikes me most is not how complex their strategies are. It is how simple they sound. Not simplistic. Not naive. But elegantly logical. Executable. Obvious once you hear them.
Yet many boardrooms still rely on 50-page strategy decks whose primary purpose seems to be to make everyone feel like the problem has been thoroughly analyzed.
But if your team needs 50 pages to understand the strategy, do you really have one?
The Paradox of Strategic Complexity
Let’s acknowledge the paradox up front:
- The world is complex.
- Organizations are complex.
- Markets, customers, talent dynamics, and supply chains are complex.
But the strategy guiding actions cannot be complex.
Otherwise people will not execute it.
In innovation research, we call this the execution friction problem. The more elaborate the thinking, the more friction it creates. More friction leads to slower movement. Slow movement leads to stagnation.
The companies that scale well, whether Amazon, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, or Warby Parker, are not the ones with the most sophisticated theoretical frameworks. They are the ones with simple, grounded logic that teams can internalize and act on.
When I interviewed Richard Rumelt — one of the world’s most influential thinkers on strategy and management — on the Outthinker podcast, he put it clearly:
“If you cannot explain your strategy in a paragraph, you do not have a strategy.”
Josh Baskin’s question lands with such force because it returns strategy to its essence. Strategy is a choice. A choice based on clear logic that anyone can test. Josh does not need a market trend analysis. He does not need a model. He simply asks whether the product creates the customer the value the team claims it does.
Simple logic.
Leaders Who Get This Right
Four minutes for a customer to walk in, be greeted, order a coffee, and find a seat. No friction. No confusion. Just a smooth start to the experience.
That kind of clarity is what great strategic leaders do best: they reduce complexity into standards people can actually execute.
Brian Niccol, now leading Starbucks and previously credited with Chipotle’s turnaround, is a modern example of strategic simplicity. He often returns to a straightforward idea:
Make it easier for customers to love the brand.
At Starbucks, that philosophy shows up in concrete terms. If you can’t get a coffee and a seat quickly, then the strategy isn’t working, no matter how good it looks on paper.
The same kind of simplicity shows up in other enduring strategies:
- FedEx: get packages absolutely, positively delivered overnight.
- IKEA: deliver well-designed, functional products at prices many people can afford.
- Domino’s: The simple “30 minutes or less” promise made the brand iconic long after the policy itself ended.
- Khan Academy: provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere.
Each of these strategies fits in a sentence. They’re easy to understand, easy to remember, and easy for teams to use when making decisions. They don’t require binders or decks to explain. They act like a compass.
That is the power of simple strategic logic.
Why Simple Logic Scales
I think many people believe that for a strategy be a winner, it needs to be smart, and for it to be smart, it needs to follow logic that only smart people can keep up with. Its logic must keep the competition guessing. But simplicity is not a sign of weak strategy. It is a sign of strategic maturity. Powerful strategies are ones that competitors can understand but can’t, or chose not to, copy.
As Verne Harnish, author Scaling Up and founder of an organization by the same name, advocates for a “one-phrase strategic statement” that serves as “the focus for the underlying activities that differentiate your company from your competition.”
When strategy is overly complex, alignment breaks down and execution suffers. That’s why a one-page strategy matters: it forces leaders to distill complex strategic logic into clear priorities, shared language, and concrete actions that the entire organization can execute against with confidence.
When leaders succeed in compressing strategy into a single page, something powerful happens. Simplicity does not just make strategy easier to communicate; it makes it easier to scale.
In fact, the most effective strategies use simplicity in three distinct ways:
1. Simplicity accelerates alignment
People cannot align around what they cannot remember. A complicated strategy may impress a boardroom, but it will not mobilize a workforce.
Simple logic becomes a rallying cry:
- “We are the low-cost airline.”
- “We deliver anything fast.”
- “We empower creators.”
- “Real food, fast.”
Every great scaling company has a strategic anchor that fits on a Post-it Note.
2. Simplicity increases adaptability
Complex strategies become rigid. Changing one part requires changing many others.
A simple strategy can adapt quickly. It enables us to quickly find new ways to drive to the goal. It becomes a decision filter.
For example, if the strategy is “make it easier for customers to love our brand,” then any potential decision can be evaluated with one question:
“Does this make things easier or harder for customers to love us?”
3. Simplicity empowers execution
Successful strategies turn into behaviors. If a strategy requires special training to understand, the organization becomes dependent on gatekeepers.
When strategy is grounded in simple logic, everyone becomes a strategist. A barista. A shift leader. A regional manager.
Everyone can make decisions consistent with the strategy because they intuitively get it.
Complexity excludes.
Simplicity empowers.
The Silent Strategy Killer
When strategies fail, leaders often assume the strategy itself was wrong. Often the strategy was fine, but it was too complex to execute.
If you hand someone a long deck explaining your strategy, you are signaling one of two things:
- You have not distilled the essence yet.
- You are relying on complexity to create the illusion of rigor.
Both are dangerous.
Returning to Josh Baskin’s Logic
The scene in Big reveals three important truths.
1. Strategy starts with customer reality
The simplest questions are the most powerful:
- What does the customer want?
- Why do they want it?
- Are we helping them get it?
2. Strategy cuts through noise
Josh was not being disruptive. He was clarifying.
3. Strategy reveals what matters most
The team focused on features.
Josh focused on purpose.
Fun was the core utility the customer sought.
When strategy reconnects to what people actually value, execution becomes natural.
How to Apply Simple Logic to Your Own Strategy
Here are five prompts to help you simplify your thinking:
- What is the customer trying to accomplish, in their own words?
- What is the simplest way we help them do that?
- How would a 10-year-old describe our strategy after hearing it once?
- What would our strategy look like on a Post-it Note?
- Which actions become obvious once the strategy is distilled?
The Strategic Power of Simplicity
The companies that scale do not win because they are the smartest. They win because they are the clearest.
They invest in simplicity.
They anchor their organizations in logic people can act on.
They build strategies that feel obvious once stated.
As Josh Baskin reminds us, the smartest strategic move is sometimes to ask a simple question:
“What’s fun about playing with a building?”
Strip away complexity. Return to logic. Let strategy be what it is meant to be: A clear path to meaningful action.
Join us in Miami on February 24 to learn more about scaling through simple logic and strategic execution.
Outthinker Networks is a global peer group of heads of strategy, innovation, and transformation at $1B+ companies who are determined to move their organizations to the next level. Members engage in curated learning, practical conversations, and networking opportunities to be more successful in performing their roles, solving their top challenges, and keeping their organizations ahead of the pace of disruption.
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