It’s the 40th monthly marketing review. Same room, same agenda, same opening line from the CEO: “How’s traffic?”
The slide is ready. It’s been ready since last Tuesday. Traffic’s up. The CEO nods, somebody says “nice work,” and the meeting moves on.
Nobody in that room asks whether a single buyer chose them this month. Not because they’re careless. Because that’s not the question the CEO asks.
The number is fine. The question is the problem.
Hi, I’m Jeff Payne. You’re listening to The Jeff Payne Show, Episode #91: The Question Is the Strategy.
If you run a company, you already know you don’t make most of the decisions. You can’t. Thousands of calls get made every week, and you’re in the room for maybe a dozen of them.
So what is the job, exactly?
Here’s the version I keep coming back to. The job isn’t to make the decisions. It’s to create the conditions under which everyone else makes them. You decide what counts as green, what counts as yellow, and what counts as red. And you do that mostly without noticing, through one habit: the questions you ask when you walk into the room.
Because everyone in that room is reading you. They notice which number gets a follow-up and which one gets a nod. They notice when you ask ten questions and when you let it slide. And they go back to their desks and build their next month around what they noticed.
That’s not a flaw in your team. That’s your team working exactly as designed. You’re the designer.
Now hold that next to something we’ve been circling for the last dozen episodes.
We’ve looked at the research showing the easiest marketing numbers to measure are the ones with the least impact on whether you get chosen. We’ve looked at an entire market where the index went up while nearly every company in it went down. We’ve looked at the planning cycle where the thing that’s actually working for you shows up in a column marked “unknown.”
Every one of those episodes was about a number that looked fine while the company lost ground.
Here’s what I didn’t say in any of them. Every number your team brings you is the answer to a question you once asked.
Somebody, years ago, opened a review with “How’s traffic?” So the team built a traffic slide. They got good at it. They hired for it, bought software for it, and tuned the agency to deliver it. And they’ve been faithfully answering that question every month since.
The world changed underneath the question. The team didn’t. Why would they? You never changed what green looks like.
This is the part I want you to sit with. The strategy deck isn’t your strategy. The deck gets presented once a year and filed. The question you ask every month is your strategy, because it’s the only instruction that actually gets repeated.
And a question can be answered “yes” every single month while your company disappears from the conversations where buyers decide. “Are we publishing?” Yes. “Is traffic up?” Yes. “Did the report go out?” Yes. “Were we named, unpaid, when a buyer asked who to call?” Nobody asked. So nobody knows.
The dashboard isn’t lying to you. It’s obeying you.
So here’s the move, and it has nothing to do with buying a new dashboard.
Change the first question.
Not the whole meeting. The first question. The one everyone prepares for. Because whatever you ask first is what the next 30 days get built around.
The test for a good first question is simple: could it be answered “yes” while a buyer who’s ready to spend never hears your name? If so, it’s a comfort question. It measures effort. Keep it if you like, but move it down the agenda.
The question that belongs at the top is some version of this: when a buyer in our market asked who to trust this month, were we in the answer, and did we earn that spot or rent it?
A CEO walks into the fortieth monthly marketing review and asks the same first question as always. The slide is ready. The number is up. And nobody in the room notices that the question stopped mattering two years ago. This is about the one instruction a CEO actually repeats — and why it quietly became the company’s real strategy.
You Don’t Make the Decisions. You Design Them.
Anyone who runs a company already knows the uncomfortable math: thousands of decisions get made every week, and the CEO is in the room for perhaps a dozen of them. So what is the job?
One useful framing, drawn from a recent interview with former Harvard Business School dean Nitin Nohria, is that the CEO’s job is not to make the decisions but to create the conditions under which everyone else makes them. The CEO decides what counts as green, yellow, or red.
Most of that gets decided without anyone noticing — through a single habit: the questions the CEO asks when they walk into the room. Everyone at the table is reading the boss. They notice which number gets a follow-up and which gets a nod, when ten questions come and when the topic slides by. Then they go back to their desks and build the next month around what they noticed.
That isn’t a flaw in the team. That’s the team working exactly as designed. The CEO is the designer.
That’s not a flaw in your team. That’s your team working exactly as designed. You’re the designer.
Every Number Was a Question First
Recent episodes of the show have circled the same problem from several directions: research showing the easiest marketing numbers to measure are the ones with the least impact on whether a company gets chosen; an entire market where the index rose while nearly every company in it shrank; a planning cycle where the thing actually working shows up in a column marked “unknown.” Every one of those was a story about a number that looked fine while the company lost ground.
Here is what none of them said. Every number a marketing team brings the CEO is the answer to a question the CEO once asked. Somebody, years ago, opened a review with “how’s traffic?” So the team built a traffic slide. They got good at it. They hired for it, bought software for it, and tuned the agency to deliver it. And they’ve faithfully answered that question every month since.
The world changed underneath the question. The team didn’t. Why would they? Nobody changed what green looks like.
The world changed underneath the question. The team didn’t. Why would they? You never changed what green looks like.
The Deck Isn’t the Strategy. The Question Is.
The strategy deck gets presented once a year and filed. The question the CEO asks every month is the only instruction that actually gets repeated — which makes it the strategy, whatever the deck says.
And a question can be answered “yes” every single month while a company disappears from the conversations where buyers decide.
Are we publishing? Yes.
Is traffic up? Yes.
Did the report go out? Yes.
Were we named, unpaid, when a buyer asked who to call? Nobody asked, so nobody knows.
The dashboard isn’t lying. It’s obeying.
This is one of the best written, most informative email newsletters I’ve ever read!
Thank you for sharing your expertise, and hope you’re doing well.
Beth Zimmerman
Founder, Executive Director
Change the First Question
The move has nothing to do with buying a new dashboard. It’s narrower than that: change the first question. Not the whole meeting — the first question, the one everyone prepares for, because whatever gets asked first is what the next thirty days get built around.
The test for a good first question is simple. Could it be answered “yes” while a buyer who is ready to spend never hears the company’s name? If so, it’s a comfort question. It measures effort. Keep it if you like, but move it down the agenda.
The question that belongs at the top is some version of this: when a buyer in our market asked who to trust this month, were we in the answer — and did we earn that spot or rent it? A CEO doesn’t have to know how to measure that yet. The team will figure out how to measure whatever the CEO keeps asking about. That’s the whole point.
Your team will figure out how to measure whatever you keep asking about. That’s what they do.
The Diagnostic
What’s the first question you ask in your marketing review? Say it out loud. Then ask: could my team answer “yes” to that every month for a year while we quietly fell out of the conversations where our customers decide?
If the answer is yes, the number isn’t the problem. The question is. And the question is yours.
The dashboard isn’t lying to you. It’s obeying you.
Source: This episode was prompted by Barry Ritholtz’s interview with Nitin Nohria on Bloomberg’s At the Money. Nohria is the former Dean of Harvard Business School and author of The CEO: The Role, the Reality, the Responsibility. His framing of the CEO’s job as creating the conditions for others’ decisions is adapted here; the examples and findings he discusses in the interview are his, not restated as the show’s own.
A note on an earlier episode: Episode 25 reported that primary-source companies were gaining ground in Google alongside platforms. The 12-month data in this brief shows that trend has reversed — companies publishing on their own domains lost ground over the year while platforms gained. The data moved; the episode above reflects where it stands now.
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