Book Review: This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

Seth Godin’s latest, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans, promises a field guide to making better strategic choices in work and life. It’s unmistakably Godin—big on reframing assumptions, small on fluff—but structurally it’s a curveball: instead of chapters, the book is broken into 297 short sections (some a page, some half a page), with no table of contents and no page numbers, just an index of section titles at the end. That “blog-compendium” feel makes the read less linear and more like a guided wander through Godin’s strategy brain. The result: a book dotted with gems, occasionally hard to follow, but rich in ideas you can put to work.

About the Author

Godin is the long-time marketing thinker behind Purple Cow, Linchpin, and This Is Marketing. He has spent decades urging makers and marketers to ship meaningful work, focus on the smallest viable audience, and build trust. That ethos also powers this book.

How the Book Is Built

Rather than a traditional chapter arc, Godin offers 297 bite-sized entries—provocations, frameworks, and cautionary tales. With no TOC and no page numbers, navigation is unconventional; you dip in and out, then rely on the index of section titles to relocate ideas. It’s a format that rewards note-taking and rereading, but can slow momentum for readers who prefer a clear map.

Purpose: What Godin Wants to Do

Godin aims to recalibrate how we think about strategy: not as a static plan, but as an evolving philosophy that sets the conditions for change. Strategy, he argues, is about choosing your game, your audience, and your narrative. You then build systems and networks that make the outcomes you seek more likely.

Key Arguments & Ideas

Strategy vs. Tactics: Strategy is your philosophy and posture; tactics are the actions that express it. Confuse them and you’ll drift.
Systems Persist: Like old Northeastern roads that began as cow paths, systems harden over time. If you’re misaligned with dominant systems, progress is painful; better to design (or leverage) systems that work for you. He cites how the U.S. News college ranking system reshaped university behavior, an example of a system changing the game it measures.
Networks Compound: As more people engage your system, inertia grows—making it both sturdier and harder to pivot. Design with that gravity in mind.
Motivation Frames: Drawing loosely on Maslow, Godin highlights drivers such as affiliation, status, and freedom from fear as levers that strategy and marketing often use.
Time Is the Scarcest Asset: You can’t do everything; choose the projects that unlock the 80/20 gains. Lay foundations that make the next 80% easier. Strategy is never “done”; it’s iterative.
Smallest Viable Audience (SVA): Start with a focused group you can truly serve; improve the product relentlessly, and let advocacy fuel growth. A brand is a promise. Make it and keep it.
Saying No Is Strategic: Choose projects, customers, and constraints intentionally. Your work isn’t for everyone (and shouldn’t be).
A Strategy Framework: Create the conditions for change via awareness, empathy, choices, uncertainty, resilience, and resources. Start local, acknowledge multiple stakeholders, and build feedback loops where success breeds more success.
Culture’s Primacy: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Even great plans fail if they collide with entrenched norms.

Effectiveness: Does It Work?

Clarity: The individual sections are crisp, provocative, and quotable. Many read like refined blog posts—easy to absorb in isolation.
Cohesion: The mosaic structure, lack of TOC, and absent page numbers can make it harder to track threads or build a cumulative argument. Readers who crave linear build-up may feel disoriented, even as they harvest insights.
Insight: High. The systems thinking, SVA emphasis, and “conditions for change” lens are actionable and grounded in decades of practice.

Personal Reflections

As a long-time Godin reader, I went in primed to enjoy it. I did, but the format slowed me down. I couldn’t just sink in; I had to nibble, pause, and jot. Still, certain lines stuck. I literally wrote on my board: “Life is a series of projects.” It reframed my past choices and future planning. The systems metaphor (roads that never quite get rebuilt, only widened) felt uncomfortably true. And his push to pick a smallest viable audience, and to say no more often, was the nudge I needed to focus. Overall: challenging to read straight through, but a goldmine of ideas.

Who Should Read It

Makers, founders, PMs, and marketers who already resonate with Godin’s voice.
Book clubs willing to discuss in themed chunks rather than chapters.
Educators teaching strategy or systems thinking—perfect for weekly prompts.

How to Get the Most From It

Read a handful of sections at a time; summarize what changes you’ll make this week.
Build a personal index: tag entries by themes (systems, audience, time, culture).
Apply the SVA test: Who’s the smallest group you can delight right now?

Verdict

This is Strategy is less a step-by-step manual and more a strategist’s commonplace book. It is dense with ideas that push you to choose, focus, and build enduring systems. The reading experience can be choppy, but the ideas land. If you appreciate Godin’s compact, perspective-shifting style, this is worth your time—and your highlighter.

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