---
title: "The Harder It Gets, the More You Need to Trade Strategy for Growth—You Have No Other Choice!"
description: "In a vast grassland, three wolf packs face starvation after a plague and drought. Their leaders choose different strategies: one conserves resources, one fights desperately, and one launches a surprise attack. The story illustrates that in difficult times, relying on operational efficiency alone is insufficient; strategic positioning is essential for breakthrough growth."
author: "梁将军"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2023-12-22"
language: "en"
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original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/RbHfRn95T8BI9m_eOGda8A"
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---

# The Harder It Gets, the More You Need to Trade Strategy for Growth—You Have No Other Choice!

> In a vast grassland, three wolf packs face starvation after a plague and drought. Their leaders choose different strategies: one conserves resources, one fights desperately, and one launches a surprise attack. The story illustrates that in difficult times, relying on operational efficiency alone is insufficient; strategic positioning is essential for breakthrough growth.

**Three Wolf Kings on the Grassland**
On a vast grassland, there lived several nomadic herder tribes and three wolf packs that moved with the grass.
That year, the grassland suffered from a plague of insects and then a drought. The once lush green grass became patchy, like a middle-aged man's balding head. The sheep had no grass to eat, and many starved to death. The herders, without sheep to tend, lost their livelihoods, and most tribes migrated away with their entire clans. Only one tribe remained, bound by ancestral traditions and unwilling to move, along with three hungry wolf packs. The patchy grassland had already starved the hares and marmots. The only prey the wolves could catch was the sheep of that remaining tribe. Clearly, the herders foresaw the wolves' intentions. The tribe kept torches burning all night, and able-bodied men took turns on night watch. Eating the herders' sheep was the only hope for the wolves to survive. But the leaders of the three wolf packs chose different attack strategies.
The first wolf king ordered his pack to attack only one corner of the sheepfold, seize just two sheep, and then retreat, preserving their strength and returning to the den hungry. When hunger became unbearable, they rationed the mutton in small portions. He planned to survive the harsh season on those two sheep.
The second wolf king, for the sake of the pack's legacy, commanded a desperate assault. One night, they attacked the sheepfold like mad, capturing three sheep, but the pack was decimated—only a few old, weak, and injured remained.
The third wolf king launched a "blitzkrieg" in the dead of night, right after the second pack's attack. The herders, exhausted from the previous battle, never expected another wolf pack to come for the sheep. Caught off guard, they lost ten fat sheep.
Two months later, the third pack, led by their king, quietly approached the first pack's den. The starving first pack was robbed of the one sheep they had been saving. After feasting on the mutton, the wolf king turned his gaze toward the second pack.
We have just experienced a similar natural disaster on this grassland. The plight, struggles, resistance, and countermeasures of the three wolf packs are a mirror of our own. But the key is: Are you the wolf king who tightens his belt, the one who fights to the death, or the one with a strategic plan?
I want to use this story to share a fact many are reluctant to believe: going hungry or working yourself to death will not pull us out of difficulty. We must understand that some resistance, though seemingly strong, can actually hasten your demise. In tough times, we need both determination and physical strength, but we must also use our brains. I've noticed an interesting phenomenon: the more comfortable we are, the more we tend to be diligent in strategy but lazy in tactics. The harder it gets, the more we tend to be diligent in tactics but lazy in strategy. **The harder it gets, the more you should use strategy to drive growth. You have no other choice.**
**We Need Strategic Growth**
You might think this fabricated story proves nothing.
So, let's replace it with a business theory from an article titled "What Is Strategy?" by Michael Porter, often hailed as the "father of competitive strategy." Porter argues that a company's growth can only come from two sources: **operational efficiency** and **strategic positioning**.
Operational efficiency means doing the same things as your competitors but at lower cost or higher effectiveness, and you win. For example, if you run a Douyin livestream with the same investment and team level, and your ROI is 1:5 while your competitor's is 1:3, you win. Strategic positioning, on the other hand, means being different. You choose different operational methods to create different value. Again, using Douyin livestreaming as an example: while your competitor builds an in-house livestream team, you design a profit model that mobilizes all your stores and distributors to form an account and livestream matrix on Douyin, using numbers to achieve scale. You replace direct control with a system and ultimately beat your competitor—that's strategy.
If you compete by improving operational efficiency, the gap between you and your competitor will be small, insufficient to defeat them. If your competitor is already a regional powerhouse, you might be the one worn down. As a strategy consulting firm owner, I often gauge a client's potential by asking questions. One common question is: "What is your biggest obstacle right now?" If the answer is "Traffic costs are getting more expensive," I judge that this client is unlikely to grow big. Because their focus is on operational efficiency, not strategic design. Such clients are often strong in execution, good at going from 0 to 1, but poor at going from 1 to 10. Going from 1 to 10 means standing out among many homogeneous players, which cannot be achieved by just improving ROI a few points. Almost all fading new consumer brands are masters of operational efficiency but idiots at strategic design. These founders think private domain traffic or product aesthetics can beat competitors, but these are only minor victories, shaking the attention of old consumer brands, not their positions.
Now, let's look at what strategic growth means. I believe 7-Eleven has been a strategy-driven company for years. It's "very un-Japanese," as typical Japanese companies favor the Toyota model, focusing on operational efficiency. Let's do a thought experiment: "If you were the founder of 7-Eleven, how would you increase revenue for this convenience store chain?" You might think of growth tactics like customizing inventory based on the consumer base around each store—more drinks and fast food near schools, more daily necessities in residential areas. Or launching limited-time breakfast group-buying during the morning rush, like milk + bread + marinated egg at 50% off from 8-9 AM. But the methods we can think of are closer to improving operational efficiency; 7-Eleven couldn't use these to create an absolute gap with other convenience stores and mom-and-pop shops. Now, look at what 7-Eleven founder Toshifumi Suzuki actually did. He introduced 7-Eleven coffee machines, betting that if the distance was close enough, some people would sacrifice coffee quality for convenience, successfully stealing business from Starbucks. He introduced 7-Eleven ATMs, which lost money for the first two years, facing internal and external criticism. But once every store in Japan had an ATM, performance exploded, and they became profitable within three years. Suzuki dared to put coffee and ATMs in convenience stores because he positioned 7-Eleven not as a retailer but as a provider of close, convenient solutions. He believed that any business that could benefit from proximity convenience was, in principle, open to 7-Eleven. This is a typical example of strategy-driven growth. **Only strategy can create a tenfold or hundredfold gap between you and your competitors, turning effort into victory. Otherwise, effort is futile.** Growth from operational efficiency is weak, safe, and imitable, while growth from strategic positioning is leapfrogging, risky, and moat-building. So, we know we need to crush competitors with strategy, making choice more important than effort. But the key is: how do we do strategy, as if stealing fire from the gods?
**True Strategic Failure Is Not Doing the Wrong Thing**
Among all big companies, Alibaba people love to talk about strategy the most.
At any industry summit or forum, if a guest is from Alibaba, they seem to speak from the clouds, in a godlike tone. But in recent years, Alibaba executives have learned to be silent, as Alibaba has become a negative example of strategy. Past strategic cases and stories of "everyone is drunk but I'm sober" have become fodder for media mockery. In 2023, Joe Tsai, now owner of the Brooklyn Nets, returned to Alibaba as board chairman—a sign of desperation. Alibaba's urgency stems from its e-commerce base being carved up. Not only are direct competitors Pinduoduo and Meituan siphoning Taobao's small and local merchants, but content e-commerce platforms like Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, and mini-programs are also trying to take traffic from all merchants, and overseas, TikTok, SHEIN, and Temu are expanding aggressively. Alibaba's 2023 restructuring seems not just to address "strategic mistakes" but to prevent the loss of its stronghold—to stop "strategic failure." Did Alibaba do anything wrong? Alibaba did nothing wrong. **But strategy is strange: strategic failure often comes not from doing the wrong thing, but from not doing what should be done.** Note this sentence; I want to repeat it: strategic failure often comes not from doing the wrong thing, but from not doing what should be done. For years, Alibaba's obsession has been traffic generation. All its troublesome competitors are masters of traffic creation: WeChat, Pinduoduo, Douyin, and overseas TikTok, SHEIN, and Temu. Platform e-commerce is essentially a conversion field, but without continuous new traffic, growth doesn't happen. When merchants lack fresh traffic, acquiring customers becomes as hard as constipation, and business everywhere is tough. Alibaba fought the WeChat battle but lost, though without regret. Pinduoduo's rise is essentially based on the WeChat ecosystem, leveraging user fission for massive low-cost traffic—a cunning growth logic akin to a Pearl Harbor attack, a forgivable loss. Content e-commerce represented by short-video platforms should not be ignored. In the years of Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu's rise, Alibaba seems to have made no effective interception. In fact, when you try to "intercept," it's often too late; the correct approach is to start half a step ahead of the industry. You should see when others can't, understand when others don't, and be decisive when others hesitate. Alibaba's past glories came from doing these three things. When Ma said he wanted to do Taobao, everyone thought it impossible, but Taobao succeeded and became Alibaba's cornerstone. When Ma insisted on Alibaba Cloud, burning money for years, it eventually led the domestic cloud industry. I believe Ma is not a god; he must have made wrong decisions, but we don't know. However, those wrong decisions didn't truly harm Alibaba. What may have truly harmed Alibaba is that it hasn't made any major wrong decisions in recent years. There's a similar consensus in the investment world. If an investor has excellent performance and a very high success rate, they shouldn't be complacent but should reflect. Because an overly high success rate often means they haven't taken enough risks, and unicorn-level investments require greater risk. This is based on a basic fact: competitors can't kill you; industry waves do. The killer of illustrators is AIGC, not another illustrator. The job of delivery drivers is taken by delivery robots, not other drivers. So, **the focus of strategy is not gaining competitive advantage but competing for future opportunity share.** Let's return to the sentence: "Strategic failure often comes not from doing the wrong thing, but from not doing what should be done." The principle is clear, but in application, we face a fatal problem: Who the hell knows what should be done and what shouldn't?
**Static Strategy vs. Dynamic Strategy**
When you doubt your strategy, you hesitate to bet big. When the team questions the strategy, they're reluctant to execute.
In the past, there were two ways to solve this strategic dilemma:
  * Rely on the founder's foresight.
  * Hire strategy consulting firms like ours as advisors.
But either way, there's a bug. Strategy is about foreseeing the future, making its effects "post-hoc," and execution is often accompanied by deep doubt, hesitation, and confusion. So-called "strategic determination" often relies on the founder's cognition and resolve, supplemented by consulting firms' mental massage. A large part of my daily work is keeping bosses from wavering and flip-flopping. But this situation isn't because clients lack resolve or consultants lack IQ; it's because our risks and rewards are asymmetric. If the judgment is wrong, the boss might lose everything, while the consulting firm just loses a client. If the consulting firm is right, they gain a classic case and more clients. There are many ways to describe strategic paths, but I think Fu Sheng's three words are precise: prediction, breakthrough point, and All in, corresponding to the three major stages of strategy: situation analysis, path selection, and resource allocation. Getting any of these wrong can doom the effort. But today, if we strictly follow this logic, we might die a miserable death. The path for strategy today should be like this:
Let's use ByteDance's short-video journey to understand the strategic path diagram above. Yiming noticed that video streams were replacing text and images as the main information format on Toutiao, so he foresaw that short-video information distribution would become the king of internet applications. With this judgment, ByteDance simultaneously launched Volcano, Douyin, and Xigua, letting three teams race. Xigua had Toutiao's traffic, Volcano had Kuaishou's model as reference, but Douyin won. Once Douyin took the lead, ByteDance spared no expense, spending up to 20 yuan per user to acquire new users. They replicated Douyin's model with TikTok as the spearhead for global expansion. In the global market, ByteDance continued to invest heavily, essentially buying a global app through ad spend. On the surface, ByteDance was just "horse racing" and A/B testing, but behind it lies the fundamental difference between how we do strategy today and in the past. What's the biggest difference between the left strategic line and the right strategic circle? The biggest difference is: **past strategy was more static; today's strategy is more dynamic.** Because in the past, the world changed slowly. A person could stay at one job for decades, and a company could monopolize a market for years. But technology makes the world change faster. When uncertainty becomes the theme of the era, strategy is no longer about "thinking clearly and executing well"; it's an infinite loop of "using ideas to probe the world, and using actions to correct ideas." To use an analogy, static strategy is like gambling: you place your bet and accept the outcome. Dynamic strategy is like an experiment: you increase your odds of being right through constant collision with the unknown. Professor Zeng Ming has a more concise expression for this difference: "Strategy is the iterative loop of vision and action." Let's return to the question: "Strategic failure often comes from not doing what should be done. But who the hell knows what should be done?" The answer is: we don't need to know. What we truly need to do is place ourselves in a wave, and without killing ourselves, use action to test. We must repeatedly rub against the world, let the optimal solution emerge on its own, and then floor the accelerator.
**Final Words**
Facing an uncertain future, we often agonize over whether to do something. Typical dilemmas I see include:
  * Should Douyin brands and Taobao brands build brand equity to escape traffic dependence?
  * Should B2B companies expand into B2C for a brighter future?
  * Should B2C companies seek growth from B2B, doing something difficult but right?
  * Should text-based bloggers start making videos?
  * If my industry is in decline, should I learn new skills to prepare for a career change?
  * ...
Sometimes this is just unnecessary anxiety, but more often, when we start hesitating about whether to do something, that's exactly when we must do it. We're just unwilling to leave our comfort zone, take risks, or lose face.
As the year ends, to prevent effort from becoming futile, seriously consider your strategy. In 2024, trade strategy for growth—you have no other choice!


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