How do you know that you have made a strategic choice?

Lots of stuff gets labelled as strategy that's not strategy at all.

This is dangerous because when a company truly believes that they have put together a good strategy when in fact they've just collected a bunch of meaningless nonsense on a PowerPoint slide and call it strategy; then ugly surprises are sure to follow.

So how can you test whether what you have decided is a proper strategic choice rather than nonsense?

The easy test is to take your statement and transform it into the opposite of what you were originally saying. If the opposite of what you originally stated makes no sense, then your original choice is also nonsense.

Here's an example: 'We strive to be customer-centric.'

Sounds nice enough.

But when we transform the statement into the opposite?

'We don't strive to be customer-centric.'? Seriously?

No company in their right mind would try and ignore the needs of their customers. Being customer-centric is a basic tenant of operating a business so this statement then is not strategic, it's how everyone shows up.

A strategic choice by definition means that one particular route was chosen in favour of all others that were available, because (through lots of analysis) it was seen that by taking that particular path it would put the business at an advantage over competitors.

Strategic choices are tough to make because they also define all of the things that the business has deliberately chosen not to do. They are powerful because they focus a company's efforts onto one carefully selected opportunity that was chosen because of the calculated reward that it holds, that nobody else has picked up on as yet.

Generic statements that stereotypically litter annual reports are usually created to lull investors, and those that matter, into the false belief that management know what they are doing, but strategically they are practically useless.

Don't tolerate bullshit. Find it and kill it and rather choose choices with significant substance.