In any organization roles and responsibilities of every department are clearly defined.Human Resources and Finance are good examples of this category. In Corporate world, there existsone department, which not only have vague responsibilities, but also itsdeliverables vary radicallyfrom one organization to another. It goes by the name Strategy or Corporate StrategyDepartment. Confusion about strategy department’s role stems from the fact that the concept of business strategy has not been defined as rigorously as other areas of business such as Finance, Marketing etc.Rather than indulging into theoretical definition of what is strategy, it is much more valuable to build an appreciation of what is NOT a strategy. Having anawareness of pitfalls of strategy can help in avoiding common but costly errors in business decisions. Delusion 1: All fluff and no stuff Business strategy requires an insightful and thoughtful analytical process behind its articulation. Absence of analytical and inductive thinking manifests itself in the form of highly verbose and worded strategy statements sprinkled with buzz words.When the strategy creator tries to state the banal as something innovativeand aspirational, then fluff is used to create a façade of intellectual sophistication. By fluff, I means usage of filler words, buzz words, data, or graph that doesn’t add value to the intent of the message. Barnes and Noble (B&N) is a major chain of book stores in United States. Since 1980, B&N’s business strategy was to developlarge scale books stores at carefully chosen locationswhere a wide variety of books can be offered at discounted rates to customers.Internet created a new venueforbooks sales, but B&N continued to focus on its strategy of physical books stores. Consequently B&Nfailed to create an effective strategy that takes into account tectonic changes of ecommerce. Lack of strategy is evident in B&N mission statement, which is full of fluff (appended below).In other words it says that we are abook store and want to keep it that way. Business strategy is one of the most misunderstood subjects in business community. Organizations are regularly falling into pitfalls of strategy formation and consequently failing to realize strategic advantage “Our mission is to operate the best specialty retail business in America, regardless of the product we sell. Because the product we sell is books, our aspirations must be consistent with the promise and the ideals of the volumes which line our shelves. To say that our mission exists independent of the product we sell is to demean the importance and the distinction of being booksellers.” Contrast this mission statement with Baladna’smission statement to appreciate stark differencesbetween the two. “To become and remain the lead supplier in every product or service segment we choose to operate within the food industry in Qatar.” Baladna’s mission statement has a clarity of thought andcan act as a guiding principle in making policies and business engagement decisions. On June 5th2017, an embargo was placed on Qatar by its neighboring countries that created a shortage of dairy products in the country. Sensing vacuum in the market and need of the country, Mr. Moutaz al-Khayyat got 3000 cows airlifted from Germany to Qatar, and founded “Baladna”. Right after its formation, Baladna launched milk based products and soon became the market leader in Qatar for milk based products. One can link each product launch of Baladna to its strategy of carefully selecting a market segment and then dominating it with high quality products. In last two years, Baladna is the fastest growing brand in Qatar. Why fluff is bad for strategy? Strategy should be actionable, that is, it should guide executive management in making long term business decisions. Strategy defined with fluff can be anything but actionable. Business leaders face a fog of activitiesin their daily lives, which is formed by numerous meetings, emails, phone calls, site visits, presentations and many more similar activities. In this fog, business executives can easily loose long term perspective of business. Business strategy is their rescue to act as a compass in directing their focus, efforts and time towards a defined end game. Strategy should help the organization in defining its policies, procedures and initiatives. Fluffy business strategy can be used as placard, but not as an instrument of future business decisions. Delusion 2: Laundry list of objectives as strategy With some variations, common strategy formulation process followed by many organization involves following steps. 1. With help of external consultants / internal strategy department, a long list strategic objectives are created for each department.Each department’s last year’s performance and current activities are used as baseline to create a list of objectives 2. Objectives are then further divided into number of initiatives. Initiatives that are expensive or having long duration are marked as strategic. 3. All objectives and initiatives are combinedto create a strategy document for the organization. These initiatives create a lot of work for the organization, which in turn create a sense of productivity.Outcomes of these initiatives, assuming completed successfully, are incremental gains rather than something thatcan be considered as strategic.Objectives and initiatives have a rightful place in business world, however, usinglist of initiatives asa strategy is a misuse of perfectly valid managerial tool. Business strategy brings focus in organizational thinking and alignment of efforts.List of incoherent initiatives does exactly the opposite. In 1985, Steve Jobs was fired from Apple Inc. Soon after Steve’s departure, signs of poor strategic directions began to emerge as Apple engaged in many initiatives and majority of those ended up being utter failures(e.g. Apple Newton, Clone Mac). After 12 years and 3 CEOs, Steve Jobs returned to Apple as a CEO.As a CEO, Steve Jobs slashed Apple’s product line by 70% (both profitable and non-profitable), killed all the clones business, shook hand with Microsoft, and fired all but one resellers of apple products. In doing so he saved Apple from looming bankruptcy, and managed garner enough resources to develop iMac that turned things around for Apple for long run. Steveexpressed his views about Apple’s strategyas “Innovation is saying ‘No’ to 1000 things”. Business strategy is one of the most misunderstood subjectsin business community. Organizations are regularly falling into pitfalls of strategy formationand consequently failing to realize strategic advantage. Having an awareness of two most common errors of strategy development can help in devising effective strategies to address challenges faced by the business. The writer is a resident of Qatar and a graduate of Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)