Your content strategy schedules everything and decides nothing.
Read the first chapter of [Book title], plus a ten-minute test you can run on your own strategy document tonight.
You already know the document I mean.
Goals at the top. Personas with stock photos. A colour-coded calendar, a dashboard with arrows. Everything in it is useful. Nothing in it is wrong.
Now look for one sentence that says what you will not do. In most versions of this document, on most shared drives, that sentence isn’t there.
A plan answers what, when, and how. A strategy answers why this, and why not that.
A chapter, a test, and one email.
The full first chapter
The diagnosis, complete and unabridged: why most content strategies are production plans in disguise, and how to tell which one you are holding.
The Forbidding Test
A one-page worksheet. Run it on your own strategy document in about ten minutes and find out, honestly, whether you are holding a plan or a strategy.
One email on launch day
When the book can be ordered, you hear it first. Just the book. Nothing else, unless you want more.
If your strategy doesn’t forbid anything, it isn’t one.
Open the file your team calls its strategy. Don’t grade it, don’t rewrite it.
List everything it makes inadmissible: every topic it rules out, every channel it declines, every request a colleague could refuse by pointing at the page.
Count the list. The worksheet tells you what the number means.
The book in one sentence
[Book title] argues that content strategy is missing a deciding layer, a discipline of strategic refusal, between the strategy document and the editorial calendar.
It builds that layer from two bodies of work: the strategy canon of Porter, Rumelt, and Martin, and the decision science of Kahneman and Duke. Written for content leads and the teams around them who want a business-strategy book’s rigour applied to their own field.
Robert Weller
Robert Weller is an independent content strategist and a lecturer at FH JOANNEUM in Graz, home of Europe’s first master’s programme in content strategy, and at FHNW in Switzerland.
He is the author of three German-language books, published by mitp, Hanser, and Springer Gabler. [Book title] is his first book in English.
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Chapter 1 and the Forbidding Test, in your inbox once you confirm your address.