These are not rules of method. They are the way I look at a company when I walk into it, and the way I have worked since I started in business strategy in 2015. I have set them out so that whoever calls me knows in advance what they will find.
Strategy is deciding what not to do.
There is never a shortage of things to do. In every company there are projects that use up time and money and lead nowhere; everyone knows it, and nobody stops them. That is where my work begins. With the owners and the board we decide what to pursue and what to stop, and we write down the criteria we used, so that the company keeps them when I am no longer there.
Not everything that can be counted counts.
The line is William Bruce Cameron’s, from 1963, and I repeated it at TEDxMacerata in 2022. Metrics were created to help us find our way, and they became the measure of worth. When they drive behavior, they end up shaping identity. Content with good numbers does not always create value, and a company that optimizes only what is easy to count loses exactly what counts. Numbers are one criterion, not the only one.
First who we are, then what we say.
Many companies start communicating before they know who they are: campaigns, a website, social media, messages that slide off because there is no center behind them. Identity is not the logo or the slogan. It is the answer to a question many people avoid, what we are and what we are not, written so that everyone in the company can use it. When it is there, the language, the form and the positioning follow from it.
Strategy is a course, and it is built together.
It is not a product to deliver or a service to buy. I bring method and an outside view that is lost from the inside; the company brings a knowledge of itself that cannot be handed over to anyone. “We’re leaving the strategy to you, let us know how it goes” does not work. Delegating means handing over a task and staying present; abandoning means handing it over and disappearing. No strategy survives the absence of the people who wanted it.
A plan that never changes has stopped working.
Markets, people, technologies and regulations all move, and a plan that is identical to itself after a year is a plan that has stopped living. Changing course does not mean the starting point was wrong. Consistency does not lie in standing still; it lies in holding the direction while adjusting the path. That is why I prefer long engagements and a weekly presence in the company: a strategy needs upkeep, like anything alive.
A company’s words are its strategy.
I listen to the words of meetings, emails and hallways, not those of press releases. They tell you whether there is a shared direction or whether everyone speaks a different language, and whether the strategy has entered the daily work or stayed a document. Language is not the clothing of thought: we live inside the words we use. Changing those words is often the first step toward changing what the company does.
Culture cannot be copied.
A competitor can copy a product, replicate a process, imitate a campaign. It cannot import another company’s culture, because culture comes from people, from history, from relationships built over time. Jay Barney showed this in 1986: culture gives a lasting advantage when it is valuable, rare and hard to imitate. The real competitive advantage is what a company is, before what it makes.
Tools come after choices.
Digital matters, and artificial intelligence is changing many jobs, but no tool replaces a direction. First you decide where to go, what to hand over to machines and what not to, and who is responsible for the choices; then you choose the systems, so you do not buy software that nobody will use. I build the adoption strategy. The company decides who builds the tools: sometimes it is Tadao Agency, which I founded in Macerata in 2008 precisely for the part where strategy meets digital; often it is the agency the company already works with.
I am nobody’s competitor.
Not of agencies, not of suppliers, not of managers inside or outside the company. I do not take anyone’s place: I work alongside them, because a real collaboration makes every party stronger, and that is what I look for. For years I was one of them, from photography to creative direction, and I know the language they speak and where the relationship with the company gets stuck. That is why art directors, creative directors, photographers, creative crews and managers often call me. I founded an agency and I work with many others. Mine is a connecting role: work that is hard to see from the outside, and that you feel when it is missing.
Whoever chooses the long term has already chosen.
In 1902 Aby Warburg wrote that the works of the early Florentine Renaissance were born of mutual understanding between patrons and artists. The patron was not simply the one who paid; it was the one who had the courage to imagine something that did not yet exist. Whoever chooses a strategic course today, instead of the quick fix, does the same thing. They accept uncertainty and invest in the long term, and that choice, before any result, is already a form of positioning.
Slowness and lightness.
These are the two words I proposed at TEDxMacerata. Slowness means giving things more time, looking for a reasoned answer rather than immediate approval, speaking to the other person’s reason and not to their instinct. Lightness, in the sense of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, does not mean superficiality but precision and responsibility, the ability to cut what is superfluous, metrics and content included. This site is written that way. That is how I work.
What I don’t do.
I do not take on speculative or unethical projects. I do not carry out decisions already made: if you call me to tell me what to do, the starting point is wrong. I do not promise a complete strategy in a few weeks; for well-defined issues there are short engagements, while a strategy takes a year. I do not sell visibility, or content made for metrics. I am not a manager, because I do not run day-to-day operations, and I am not a coach.
I could be wrong.
I have no final truths to offer. I said so at TEDxMacerata, and it holds for this page too: what I write today may turn out to be outdated, and if this manifesto were identical in a few years’ time, it would mean I had stopped looking. I will update it.
Macerata, October 2026
Business strategy
Business strategy is the set of decisions through which a company chooses what to do and what not to do in order to reach its long-term goals, improve its competitive position and grow in a sustainable way.
Full definition