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April 16, 2025
“I’m going to give you seven seconds to answer… what is your strategy?”
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
“Okay, that was more like eight seconds,” counted Alex Smith, illustrating his point to a deafening silence.
It wasn’t a normal quietness.
Rather a noise so profound and intense that it stood out, creating an emotional impact among 400 of the most influential minds across business and technology in Australia.
The room was thinking. Then it was listening.
“Now, that would have been an interesting exercise for you,” Smith summarised.
“For some, you won’t have necessarily known what to say and you’ll have hesitated. If that’s the case then congratulations, you’re part of the 98% of businesses operating with no strategy at all. So don’t worry, you’re in a very big club.”
But what about the others?
“Some of you will have written something down very quickly – ‘oh yes, it must be this’ – you were probably very, very confident,” Smith added. “But there’s a lot of stuff which we attribute to the word strategy which is not actually strategy at all.”
In headlining Moxie Authority 2025, Smith was deliberate in his opening and targeted in his delivery.
This wasn’t some gimmick warm-up act, an easy way to drum up audience engagement and manufacture false energy in the room. This was a simple yet ruthless exercise in exposing executive misconception.
“I don’t know anything at all about what you do or about your business,” preempted Smith, speaking with a refreshing dose of authenticity. “But what I do know about is probably the most universal but also most misunderstood and frankly most bullshit part of all business, and that is strategy.”
Against this backdrop, London-based Smith – Founder of Basic Arts – tacked the root cause of strategic failure with a proposition.
“What if I told you that you could 30X your business with zero more investment and zero more effort?” he asked. “You do everything the way you’re doing now but you’re doing it through pure thought alone.”
Thinking about that logically, it’s possible. If a CEO chooses path A instead of path B or C, then each big decision will have profoundly different results.
“That is basically what strategy is all about,” Smith said.
“Strategy is just the art of making the choices that will give you leverage and have an exponential effect on the business. Make choices that your competitors are not making because that will carve your own much more profitable path in the market.”
For Smith – who has advised fledging start-ups to multinational companies across the world on the art of creating strategy clarity – this is the one area of focus that CEOs should be thinking about 70-80% of the time.
“Everything else is downstream of this,” he continued. “Plus, everything else can be pretty much delegated but not so much this part.”
Smith speaks strategy for a living. He has guided “hundreds and hundreds” of businesses and can confirm with “total confidence” that almost all are operating with zero strategy of any kind.
“You can still run a reasonably successful business without it,” he qualified. “I’m not here to tell you that you’re going to fail because you don’t have a strategy.
“But it’s just a fact that most businesses are operating reactively – they’re hustling, they’re grinding and they’re just trying to edge ahead of their competitors through sheer force of effort.”
The Strategy Stack
Aligned to the theme of Inspired Knowledge, Moxie Authority 2025 housed the most influential figures setting the market agenda in business and technology across Australia.
This inaugural and invite-only conference in Sydney hosted more than 400 industry front-runners spanning all ends of the ecosystem, from CEOs, CIOs and CTOs to CDOs, CISOs and Founders.
Amid such a powerful community of courageous innovators, cautious modernisers and composed transformers, common ground was found in one mission-critical area – strategy.
“If strategy is so important and so powerful, then why is it so rare?” Smith questioned. “Why is this not the most top of mind thing for every business on the planet?
“And having thought about this a lot, I think the main reason is because strategy is unlike most other things which we develop as business leaders and owners. Strategy is not a thing.”
In other words, strategy cannot be pictured in our heads.
It’s not like a website or a logo – you know if you have it or if you don’t have it. Strategy isn’t binary, nor can it be realised on a scale of zero to one between not having one and having one.
“We’re going to turn strategy into a thing,” Smith said.
“We’re going to turn it into something that is so concrete and so binary and so obvious that you will be able to look at it and you will say for sure, right, I have that, or I don’t have that.”
Pause. Next slide. The Strategy Stack.
Split into two sections:
Comprised of four components:
“If a business has these four components, it becomes bloody easy and profitable to run,” Smith advised. “But you’ll quickly realise that even though they’re quite simple, they’re also quite rare and quite unusual.”
Starting at the top, the most foundational concept of new value challenges the very motivations behind starting a business in the first instance.
Deep down, most are for selfish reasons – more money, own boss etc.
“Now that’s fine because I’m no different but a business can’t survive like that for very long,” Smith cautioned. “Clearly you’re going to need the market to play ball and the market doesn’t give a crap about your own personal needs and desires for yourself.”
Businesses that remain in this selfish headspace quickly fail, hence the need to move along to the next stage of consciousness. That is, giving value to the customer.
“It seems very clever, doesn’t it?” Smith probed. “It seems like when you move into that headspace, you’re done and you’ve cracked the code.”
Most businesses operating in the cut-throat technology ecosystem across Australia arrived at this stage many years ago. In fact, customer value is wrapped up in their very existence and identity.
“You all think that’s sufficient but it actually isn’t,” Smith challenged.
“Because you have the very basic problem that all of your competitors are also trying to give value to the customer. So, if you’re all in the same category with the same customers solving the same problems then that is obviously a recipe for commodification.”
More bluntly put… if hundreds or thousands of businesses are delivering the same value to the same group of customers, why does your business need to exist at all?
“You’re just doubling, tripling or quadrupling up on what is already out there,” Smith added. “The world wouldn’t care if you disappeared tomorrow because whatever you’re doing is already well catered for.”
It’s for this reason that companies continue to slash costs and cut prices. The fight is all too real with margins being destroyed to get one inch ahead of the competition.
“Very, very few businesses take the super simple and logical leap to the final step – the final stage of consciousness,” Smith coached.
Bring new value to the customer.
How to create new value through sacrifice
In 2025, late stage capitalism has resulted in almost every market on the planet becoming mature and well served 100 or even a 1000 times over by many different players.
But CEOs can’t just come up with new value just by thinking of it. No amount of strategy days or new features can solve this simple problem.
Those predictable actions simply contribute to that commodifying race to the bottom because everybody is already doing the same.
“When you’re in a world of abundance and all the low hanging fruit has been picked, how can you actually find this needle in a haystack which is a genuine form of new value?” Smith asked.
“It comes down to you having to do something which your competitors are fundamentally not prepared to do… and that thing is sacrifice.”
As a voice of authority in this space – with hundreds of examples to draw upon – Smith was unequivocal in his belief that almost all strategy is built on a key sacrifice.
“Choose something which your competitors value very, very deeply and think is a complete non-negotiable in your space and choose to not do it, or choose to do it badly, or choose to undermine it and go against it,” he advised.
“When you remove one key piece of the puzzle, you open up a whole new vista of possibilities which your competitors and yourself couldn’t actually even see before because it’s incompatible with the thing that you’ve removed.”
Smith shared that all of the titans of industry were built on enormous sacrifices which at the time seemed ridiculous or even suicidal.
“Every single business needs a similar sacrifice to generate new value,” Smith clarified. “That is why strategy is so rare because people either don’t think to do this or are not necessarily prepared to do it.”
There has to be a little pain to separate your business from the chasing pack and for those committed to that approach, the next logical question is… what do we sacrifice?
Smith reframed the conversation however.
“Think about it as a disagreement,” he noted. “What is the one thing that you disagree with your competitors about in a casual colloquial way?
“Are you in a position to say that they all think X but actually, I personally think Y? One opinion is all it takes to open up that little crack.”
That is when CEOs can start to pull on the thread and uncover a different point of view in a crowded industry.
Start becoming opinionated and start having a differentiated point of view. Then eventually, you’ll reach the point of sacrifice.
The Strategy Stack continues but first, businesses must tackle this concept head-on – no skipping a step and no shortcuts.
“To get results others don’t, you have to do things that others won’t,” Smith shared.
Moxie Authority 2025 housed the most influential figures redefining business and technology across Australia. This inaugural and invite-only conference in Sydney hosted more than 400 industry front-runners spanning all ends of the ecosystem, from CEOs, CIOs and CTOs to CDOs, CISOs and Founders.
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