Planning 2027: The One-Page Strategy Executives Actually Use

At Amazon, meetings do not start with slides. According to Jeff Bezos’s 2017 letter to shareholders, they start with silence, as everyone in the room reads a six-page memo before anyone speaks.

The catch is that the memo has to be good. Bezos wrote that a great one should take a week or more: written, revised, shared with colleagues, set aside and edited again.

Most companies are about to do the opposite. Picture a leadership team this month approving a 60-slide 2027 plan that no one in the room could summarize in a sentence.

Why does a one-page strategy work better than a long plan?

Because length hides missing decisions. A deck can list every initiative without ever saying which one matters most. A single page cannot.

The alignment problem is real. Research by Donald Sull, Charles Sull and James Yoder, published in MIT Sloan Management Review, drew on survey responses from 4,012 people at 124 companies. Only 28% of executives and middle managers responsible for carrying out strategy could list three of their company’s strategic priorities.

The gap starts at the top. Just 51% of top team members agreed on the company’s priorities, and among their direct reports the figure fell to 22%.

Amazon’s six-page memo and a one-page strategy share the same idea. Both force leaders to write in full sentences and make choices, instead of hiding behind bullet points. One page is simply the version a whole company can carry around.

What goes on a one-page strategy?

There are many formats, from OKR sheets to strategy canvases. The ones executives actually keep using tend to answer eight questions, in this order.

1. Where are we now? Two or three sentences on the honest state of the business, including the problem you are trying to solve.
2. What are we aiming for? One measurable ambition for 2027.
3. Where will we play, and where won’t we? The customers, markets and offers you will focus on, plus what you are deliberately leaving alone.
4. How will we win there? The one or two reasons a customer picks you over the alternatives.
5. What are our three priorities? Not five. Not seven. Three.
6. How will we know? One or two numbers per priority, with a target and an owner.
7. What will we stop doing? The projects, products or habits that free up time and money for the three priorities.
8. What could knock us off course? The two or three risks that matter most, and the signal that would trigger a change in plan.

Questions 3 and 7 are the hard ones, and they are the point. Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management, argued in Harvard Business Review’s “The Big Lie of Strategic Planning” that strategy makes executives uncomfortable because it requires choices that rule out other possibilities. A page with no “won’t” and no “stop” is a wish list, not a strategy.

What does a completed one-page strategy look like?

Here is a hypothetical example for a regional commercial cleaning company with about 300 employees. The company is invented, but the format is the one described above.

Question	Example answer
Where we are now	Revenue grew, but margins slipped because we said yes to every small contract across four states. Turnover among crew leads is our biggest operating problem.
2027 ambition	Raise operating margin by three points while keeping revenue flat to slightly up.
Where we play	Medical offices and light industrial sites in our two strongest metro areas.
Where we won’t	One-time cleans, residential work and new states.
How we win	Consistent crews that pass health-care compliance checks the first time.
Three priorities	1. Keep crew leads. 2. Grow medical accounts. 3. Exit unprofitable contracts.
How we’ll know	Crew lead turnover, medical revenue share and gross margin by account, each reviewed monthly by a named owner.
What we’ll stop	Bidding on contracts below our margin floor and running promotions in markets we are leaving.
Risks and triggers	If a top-five client leaves or wage costs rise faster than planned, revisit the margin target at the next quarterly review.

Notice what the page does not include: a list of 40 initiatives, a vision statement full of adjectives or a section for every department. Department plans can exist. They just have to point back to these three priorities.

What assumptions should a 2027 plan be built on?

Every one-page strategy rests on a few numbers. Use outside data to test yours.

The Duke University CFO Survey, run with the Richmond and Atlanta Fed banks, offers one useful check. In its third-quarter 2026 results, CFOs expected average revenue growth of 7.2% in 2027, but the median expectation was 5.0%. They expected unit costs to rise 4.2% and average wages 4.3%.

If your plan assumes revenue growth well above the median while costs stay flat, write down why. That sentence belongs in the “where we are now” box.

Plan for change, too. Forrester’s 2027 Budget Planning Guides quote chief research officer Sharyn Leaver: “Business leaders are no longer planning for a return to stability.” That is the reason for question 8. A good one-page strategy names the triggers that would change it.

For the margin side of the page, our guide on whether your profit fits your business offers a practical way to test whether your earnings support the plan.

How do you build the page with your leadership team?

Most teams can draft a solid version in two working sessions of about three hours each.

Who should be in the room?

Keep the drafting group small: the CEO and the five to eight leaders who own the biggest budgets and teams. Add one or two people closer to customers, such as a top regional manager or a senior account lead, so the page is tested against what the front line sees.

Board members and outside advisors are better used as reviewers of a strong draft than as co-authors of a blank page.

Session 1: Diagnose and choose

Before the meeting, ask each leader to write their own answers to questions 1 through 4, independently. Compare them at the start. The differences tell you where alignment is weakest.

Spend the session agreeing on the current state and on where you will and will not play. Do not move on until the “won’t” list has real items on it.

Session 2: Commit and measure

Pick the three priorities, the measures and the owners. Then fill in the “stop” box. Each priority should free up or redirect something specific.

Finish by writing the page in plain sentences, the way Amazon’s memos are written. Read it aloud. If a phrase would confuse a new hire, rewrite it.

How do you get the whole company to use it?

Publishing the page is the easy part. The MIT Sloan research found that the strongest predictor of alignment was how consistently managers explained their team’s priorities in terms of both their unit and the company as a whole.

That suggests three habits:

• Cascade by conversation, not by email. Each leader walks their own team through the page and explains how their work connects to the three priorities.
• Ask teams to write their own one-pager. Same format, scoped to their area, with each priority tied to a company priority.
• Use the page in decisions. When a new project is proposed, ask which of the three priorities it serves. If the answer is none, it waits.

That last habit is where most of the value sits. Our column on optimizing for great decisions makes the broader case that outcomes follow the quality of the choices leaders make.

How often should you update a one-page strategy?

Review it every quarter and rewrite it once a year. The quarterly review should take an hour, not a day.

• Check each measure against its target.
• Look at the risk triggers. Has any been tripped?
• Confirm the “stop” list is actually stopped.
• Change a priority only if the facts behind it changed, not because a new idea arrived.

If a major risk does materialize, such as losing a large customer or a sudden cost shock, revisit the page right away rather than waiting for the quarter to end. Our guide to crisis risks and how leaders can protect their business covers how to plan those responses in advance.

What are the most common mistakes?

• Too many priorities. If there are more than three, there are effectively none.
• Measures without owners. A number nobody owns is a number nobody moves.
• An empty “stop” box. New priorities need time and money that has to come from somewhere.
• Writing it alone. A CEO’s private page does not create shared choices.
• Filing it away. A strategy that only appears at the annual offsite is not guiding anything.

What is the real test of a one-page strategy?

Go back to that silent room at Amazon. The memo works because everyone reads the same thing, in full, before they argue about it.

Your one page can do the same job for 2027. If a crew lead, a sales rep and a board member could each read it in five minutes and come away with the same three priorities, it is working. If they cannot, it is worth taking the extra week to rewrite it. Bezos would say that is about how long a good one takes.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a strategy and a plan?

A plan lists activities and budgets. A strategy makes choices about where to compete and how to win, including what not to do. A one-page strategy should hold the choices, with detailed plans sitting underneath it.

How many strategic priorities should a company have?

Most experienced planners recommend three or fewer for a given year. More than that tends to spread resources thin and makes it hard for managers to remember or act on them.

Is a one-page strategy enough for a large company?

It is enough for the company-level choices. Large companies usually add one-page plans for each division or function that tie back to the company's priorities, plus detailed budgets and operating plans.

When should 2027 strategic planning start?

Many calendar-year companies draft strategy in the fall so it can shape the budget before year end. If budgets are already set, a one-page strategy can still guide how money and time are used in early 2027.

What is the difference between a one-page strategy and OKRs?

OKRs (objectives and key results) are a goal-setting method. A one-page strategy sets the bigger choices, such as where to play and what to stop, and OKRs can be used to track progress on its priorities.

Sources

• Amazon: 2017 Letter to Shareholders
• MIT Sloan Management Review: No One Knows Your Strategy, Not Even Your Top Leaders
• Harvard Business Review: The Big Lie of Strategic Planning
• Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond: CFO Survey Q3 2026 data and results
• Forrester: 2027 Budget Planning Guides