Not many years ago, there was a CEO so exceedingly fond of finding the right strategy that he spent all of his money on consultants to tell him what the strategy should be. One day there came two consultants, and they said they could craft the most magnificent strategy imaginable. Not only would it solve all of the problems and produce great prosperity and profitability; it had yet another feature: It would make no sense to anyone not qualified to be in his job.

“This would be just the strategy for me,” thought the CEO. “If I adopted it, then I would be able to discover which managers in my company are unfit for their posts. I could tell the ones I can trust from those who must be fired. Yes, I must have this strategy.” And he paid the consultants a large sum of money to start work at once.

The consultants set up their laptops and pretended to produce all sorts of presentations, though the presentations were actually jargon, buzzwords, and gibberish. They demanded all sorts of information about customers, sales, products, and market sectors while they worked their PowerPoint far into the night.

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