Strategic choices: a clear trade-off means fewer decisions

In this Italian-language video, shot in front of the Guggenheim in New York, I talk about Frank Lloyd Wright’s ramp and Michael Porter’s line about strategy as choosing what not to do. Here I explain why strategic choices, when they clearly give something up, spare the company the decisions it would otherwise have to make again every day, and what remains free to change.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

I am at the Guggenheim in New York. The building you see behind me is one of the most controversial in the history of twentieth-century architecture.

Frank Lloyd Wright received the commission in 1943, but the museum did not open until 1959. During those sixteen years, the press called the design a “washing machine,” a giant “corkscrew,” even a gigantic “toilet bowl.”

In December 1956, twenty-one artists signed a petition in the New York Times against the design.

Wright changed nothing.

His idea was simple but radical. A museum without rooms. A single continuous ramp. No detours, no crossroads, no choice of route.

And when I read Michael Porter, the economist who redefined the theory of strategy at Harvard, I think of Wright.

Porter wrote a line that has become famous in the management literature: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

Wright had applied this principle to architecture forty years before Porter theorized it.

In companies the opposite happens. Every day, time is spent standing at forks in the road. What to do first. What to say yes to. How many opportunities to respond to.

But a well-built strategy does not multiply the possibilities. It narrows them.

Wright knew it, Porter proved it: when there is only one direction, the choosing comes to an end. And with the choosing, the hesitation ends too.

A well-made strategy does not eliminate the work.

But it does eliminate the confusion of too many detours.

A clear trade-off means fewer decisions

The Guggenheim’s ramp is easier to understand if you start with the elevator. Frank Lloyd Wright wanted visitors to take the elevator to the top and then walk down, at a slow pace, along a continuous spiral about four hundred meters (a quarter of a mile) long. In doing so he gave up the sequence of connected rooms found in traditional museums, where you pass from one room to the next and have to retrace your steps to get out. In the video I call it a ramp with no detours and no crossroads, and I set it beside the companies that spend time every day standing at forks in the road.

A clear strategy does not take away work, it takes away decisions: what the company has chosen not to do no longer has to be decided every day, by each person.

The work remains, and often grows, because what you have chosen to do has to be done better. What shrinks is the number of questions reopened at every meeting: whether to chase the customer who wants a different product, whether to go back to that trade fair, whether to accept the oversized order. In a company that has decided what it does not do, many of these questions are answered before they are even asked, and the attention of the people who work there can go elsewhere.

Porter: strategic choices serve those who decide every day

Michael Porter’s line comes from “What Is Strategy?”, a 1996 article in the Harvard Business Review: “the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” I have written about it in connection with the work of the business strategist. Porter, who holds a doctorate in business economics from Harvard and is now a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, made the case for it with examples from many companies. The same article contains a passage that is quoted less often. For the people who run a company, it may be the most practical one.

For Porter, the trade-offs that a position imposes mean that “more of one thing necessitates less of another.” Trade-offs, he writes, “create the need for choice and purposefully limit what a company offers.” A company that tries to be all things to all customers, on the other hand, risks confusion among its people, because each of them makes day-to-day decisions “without a clear framework.”

In 1996 Michael Porter wrote that one of the most important functions of an explicit, communicated strategy is to guide people through the choices that trade-offs impose every day, in each person’s work.

From this comes the task Porter gives to the people who lead a company: teaching strategy to others, and saying no. A trade-off that stays in the owners’ heads spares nobody anything. Written down and explained, it becomes the criterion the sales manager uses to answer a customer without having to ask every time. Trade-offs also have a second effect, which Porter notes in the same article: without them, any good idea would be copied quickly, because imitating it would not mean giving anything up. This is one of the ways a clear choice becomes a competitive moat.

Wright’s ramp, seen up close

Wright received the commission in 1943, through a letter from Hilla Rebay, Solomon Guggenheim’s art advisor, and the museum opened on October 21, 1959, six months after his death. The final design dates from 1956, forty years before Porter’s article.

Seen up close, the ramp is less rigid than its image suggests. It is divided into bays that follow one another like the segments of a citrus fruit, each self-contained and all linked together (the comparison comes from Matthew Drutt, who was a curator at the museum). On the way down you can turn toward the central space and see works on different levels at once, and you can leave midway, by the elevator or the stairs. Wright set the route and left the pace and the moment of leaving to the visitor.

The trade-off came at a price, and some people said so, with good reason. In December 1956 twenty-one artists wrote an open letter to the museum’s director and to the foundation’s board of trustees: a building like this, they argued, was not suited to displaying painting and sculpture. They also sent it to the newspapers, and the New York Times reported it on December 12. During the years of construction and around the opening, the building also earned nicknames such as “washing machine” and “corkscrew.” On the problem itself the painters were right: the slope is three degrees, and curators still compensate for it today with custom-made supports so that the paintings look level. A strategy that upsets nobody has usually not given anything up. The same story, seen from the angle of the criticism and of who gets believed in a discussion, is in the video on how to recognize merit.

The direction stays, the path is updated

The heart of the idea, the ramp, was there at the opening, slope included. Around it, the design changed a great deal. From 1943 on, Wright made about seven hundred sketches and six sets of working drawings, revised the plans until the city granted the permit in 1956, and found, with the contractor George Cohen, a less expensive way to build the spiral. Before the opening, the museum’s director had the interior painted white and the paintings hung on steel rods that held them away from the walls.

Porter describes the same balance with two agendas. The operational agenda, he writes, is “the proper place for constant change, flexibility, and relentless efforts to achieve best practice.” The strategic agenda “demands discipline and continuity; its enemies are distraction and compromise.” Strategic positions, he adds, “should have a horizon of a decade or more.” A company may have to change its strategy when the structure of its industry changes.

Narrowing the choices sets the direction, not every step: for Porter too, a company’s position should last ten years or more, while operational work is the place for constant change.

This is the distinction I use to answer those who ask me whether the strategy changes during the work: the direction stays; the path to get there is updated. A strategic plan that is unchanged after a year has stopped working. The detours that a good business strategy allows for concern the path, and the confusion of too many detours comes from elsewhere: from reopening the question of direction at every fork instead of applying the criteria already written with the owners. Writing those criteria, and keeping the two things apart, is part of the work on direction and priorities.

A single direction, after all, does not mean a single customer or a single market: the trade-off concerns what the company does, while the range of its customers concerns whom it depends on. Giving something up while knowing that someone will object remains one of the hardest decisions for the people who run a company, and one of those I respect most.

What to do and what not to do

• Write down with the owners what the company does not do, and explain it to those who make decisions every day.
• Change the direction only for a fundamental shift, such as a change in the structure of the industry, and leave that decision to the owners.
• Listen to objections to a trade-off, because they tell you what it costs.
• Do not reopen at every meeting a choice that has already been made.
• Do not mistake a strategy that upsets nobody for a prudent strategy.

Sources

• Michael E. Porter, “What Is Strategy?”, Harvard Business Review, November–December 1996, pp. 61–78. https://hbr.org/1996/11/what-is-strategy
• Harvard Business School, faculty profile of Michael E. Porter. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6532
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, “The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Timeline.” https://www.guggenheim.org/about-us/architecture/timeline
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, “Frank Lloyd Wright and the Guggenheim New York.” https://www.guggenheim.org/about-us/architecture/frank-lloyd-wright-and-the-guggenheim
• New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, Guggenheim Museum, designation report LP-1775, August 14, 1990. https://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/1775.pdf
• Kate Lingley, “Three Degrees in the Forecast: The 1956 Artists’ Response to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ramp,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, September 16, 2026. https://www.guggenheim.org/articles/behind-the-scenes/three-degrees-in-the-forecast-the-1956-artists-response-to-frank-lloyd-wrights-ramp
• Matthew Drutt, entry on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, culturenow.org. https://culturenow.org/site/solomon-r-guggenheim-museum
• “The Guggenheim: An Assessment of Wright’s Masterwork,” The Saturday Evening Post, April 21, 2017 (from Finis Farr, 1961). https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/04/wrights-masterwork/
• Barry Popik, “Great Stone Toilet Bowl (Guggenheim Museum),” with the Associated Press articles of April 1959. https://barrypopik.com/blog/great_stone_toilet_bowl_guggenheim_museum