The Business Habits Worth Stealing This Quarter
Every new quarter, founders and operators face the same frustrating breakdown. A general business strategy crafted with enthusiasm in January evaporates by March. Nobody kills the plan on purpose. Instead, daily fires, client emergencies, and hiring scrambles simply bury it. Eventually, the strategy document becomes something people mention in meetings but never actually open.
So this quarter, instead of writing another “10 tips” listicle, I sat down with someone who has spent two decades in the room when that plan either survives or dies. Grace Halloran is an executive and business coach. She has worked with everyone from three-person agencies to midsize manufacturing firms trying to professionalize how they operate. Specifically, I wanted to know, in practice rather than theory, what separates businesses that execute a general business strategy from those that just write one down and hope.
We talked for almost two hours. I trimmed the conversation for length, not for honesty. That includes the parts where she pushed back on questions I thought were pretty reasonable.
Most general business strategy documents are eulogies, not plans
Me: Let’s start blunt. What’s actually broken in how most small and midsize businesses approach strategy?
Grace: Honestly? Most strategy documents are eulogies, not plans. Someone writes them once, usually in a burst of January optimism. Then nobody touches them again until it’s time to write the next one. That’s not a strategy. In reality, it’s a time capsule.
If you want to get technical, a real general business strategy isn’t a document at all. Instead, it’s a set of habits. It’s the rhythm a company keeps: the questions it asks itself on a schedule, the decisions it revisits, the things it refuses to let slide even when everyone’s busy. Harvard Business Review ran a piece years ago about what makes an executive effective, and it still holds up. None of it was about having a brilliant five-year vision. Rather, it covered things like knowing where your time actually goes versus where you think it goes. It also covered pushing decisions down to the lowest level that can competently make them. Boring stuff. Repeatable stuff.
Me: So the habit matters more than the plan itself?
Grace: Eventually, the habit is the plan. After all, a plan with no habit behind it is a wish.
Habit #1: Put a real general business strategy review on the calendar, not a status update
What a real quarterly review actually asks
Me: Okay, let’s get concrete. If someone’s starting fresh this quarter, what’s the first habit you’d tell them to steal?
Grace: The quarterly business review, done properly, which is rarer than you’d think. Most companies that “do QBRs” just run a longer version of their weekly status meeting. Revenue’s up, revenue’s down, here’s the pipeline, everyone nods, meeting ends. In fact, that kind of reporting theater is often why founders eventually bring in outside help just to make sense of the numbers.
A real quarterly review, by contrast, asks harder questions. What did we say we’d do ninety days ago, and did we do it? If not, why not? Was the goal wrong, or did we just fail to execute? What’s the market telling us that our plan didn’t account for? Indeed has a useful breakdown of how to run these reviews without them turning into theater. One thing it gets right is separating the review from the reporting. You’re not there to present numbers. Instead, you’re there to interrogate them. That kind of review turns a general business strategy from a slide deck into something the company actually runs on.
What “interrogate” actually means
Me: What does “interrogate” look like in practice? That word alone might scare off a lot of small business owners.
Grace: Fair point, bad word choice for a nervous founder. What I mean is this: don’t let anyone in the room, including yourself, get away with a vague answer. For example, say someone reports that marketing underperformed. Your next question isn’t a nod. It’s “underperformed against what, and what did we learn about the channel versus the message versus the offer?”
If the number in question is what you paid an agency, learn what marketing agencies actually bill for. Then you can judge whether the spend or the execution was the real problem. You’re not trying to assign blame. Rather, you’re checking whether your model of the business matches reality. If it doesn’t, everything downstream of that model is just guesswork dressed up as strategy.
Habit #2: Set general business strategy goals you can kill or keep every ninety days
Why OKRs still earn their keep in a general business strategy
Me: Let’s talk about goal setting. OKRs, objectives and key results, come up constantly in these conversations. Is that still the right framework, or has it become a buzzword that’s lost its teeth?
Grace: Both, honestly. It’s overused as a term and underused as a discipline. Used properly, however, OKRs are one of the clearest ways to operationalize a general business strategy. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has a good explainer on why smaller business owners benefit from OKRs. Importantly, the core idea holds regardless of company size. You separate the ambitious “why,” the objective, from the measurable “did it happen,” the key results. The framework isn’t the failure point. Instead, companies fail when they write objectives that are really tasks in disguise, or key results so soft they can claim victory no matter what.
Me: Give me an example of a “soft” key result.
Grace: “Improve customer satisfaction.” By how much, measured how, by when? Now compare that to “raise NPS from 32 to 45 by the end of Q2, using last quarter’s survey instrument.” You can fail at the second one. And you need to be able to fail at your goals. That’s what makes them real. Atlassian’s OKR guide captures this well: a key result should feel a little uncomfortable to commit to. So if everyone in the room feels confident you’ll hit it, it wasn’t ambitious enough to count as strategy. It was just a forecast.
How often to revisit them
Me: How often should teams revisit them? Quarterly, obviously, but does anything happen in between?
Grace: Set them quarterly, but I push clients toward a short checkpoint every other week, fifteen or twenty minutes. Not a status meeting. Just one question: is this key result still the right one, given what we’ve learned since we set it? Google’s re:Work materials on goal setting make a point I like. OKRs work best as a living conversation, not a contract you sign in January and grade yourself on in December. Otherwise, if you only look at them at the finish line, you’ve turned a compass into a report card.
Habit #3: Protect your calendar like it’s the actual product
Time is the resource nobody protects
Me: Let’s shift to something more personal: how leaders spend their actual hours. You said something off the record earlier that I want on the record. “Most founders think they don’t have time for strategy. They have time. They’ve just given all of it away.”
Grace: I’ll stand by that. People treat time blocking like a productivity hack, a little trick for getting through your inbox faster. For an executive, however, it’s closer to a survival skill. If you don’t decide where your attention goes, your calendar becomes a public good. As a result, anyone can claim a piece of it, and eventually someone will claim all of it.
There’s decent research now on how leaders protect deep work time, and the pattern is consistent. Leaders who actually think strategically defend a block of uninterrupted time like a client contract. In other words, they run a real general business strategy, not just a to-do list. Nobody “accidentally” schedules over a client call. But people let literally anything eat into a strategy block.
Delegation is time blocking’s less glamorous sibling
Me: And where does delegation fit into this?
Grace: It’s the less glamorous sibling. You can’t protect time for strategic thinking while you still approve expense reports or proofread emails that don’t need your eyes. The same goes for personally closing out the same recurring tickets your help desk should already own.
I’ve seen good breakdowns on this. My favorites, for instance, frame delegation as a leadership tool in its own right, a way of building capability in the people around you. It’s not just “getting things off your plate.” In fact, if you delegate purely to reduce your own workload, you’ll delegate badly. You’ll hand off the wrong things, at the wrong time, with too little context. Then you’ll conclude “delegation doesn’t work here,” when really you just did it wrong.
Me: What’s the actual test for whether something should be delegated?
Grace: Ask two questions. First, can someone else do this at seventy percent of my quality or better within a reasonable timeframe? Second, does this task actually require my specific judgment, or does doing it myself just feel safer because I always have? Unfortunately, most founders fail that second question a dozen times a week and don’t notice.
Habit #4: Make decision making a general business strategy habit
Me: You mentioned that HBR piece earlier, Peter Drucker’s “effective executive” idea. Can you unpack it a bit more? What does it mean for a business’s actual strategy, not just the person at the top?
Grace: Drucker’s argument boils down to this: effectiveness isn’t a personality trait. Instead, it’s a set of practices anyone can learn. Know where your time goes. Focus on contribution rather than effort. Build on strengths instead of trying to fix every weakness. Finally, make decisions in the right order, and not too many of them.
That last one is underrated. Many leaders think good strategy means having strong opinions on everything. It’s actually the opposite. Good strategy means holding very strong opinions about the two or three decisions that matter this quarter, and staying almost indifferent about the rest. Indeed, getting that shortlist right is most of what a general business strategy actually is this quarter.
Me: How do you find those two or three decisions?
Grace: Ask what would change the trajectory of the business if you got it right, versus what just needs handling. For example, hiring your first VP of Sales might be a trajectory decision. So might finally fixing a staffing plan that keeps falling apart every Q2. Choosing a shade of blue for the website, however, is not, no matter how long that meeting runs. I’ve watched leadership teams spend ninety minutes on the blue.
Habit #5: Don’t let your general business strategy live only in your head
Me: Everything so far seems to depend on the person at the top actually doing it. How do these habits survive contact with a real team, people who didn’t sit in this interview and don’t share your instincts?
Grace: Honestly, this is where most of it falls apart. A founder reads a great article, no offense, and catches fire. They run one great quarterly review, set sharp OKRs, and block their calendar for a month. Then quarter two arrives, and none of it happens. The habit lived entirely in their head, and the company never built it into how it operates.
Businesses that make it stick, by contrast, turn the habit into a structure other people can run without them. The review gets a template. A standing calendar invite covers the OKR checkpoint, so nobody depends on the founder remembering to send it. Someone other than the CEO owns the process, even if the CEO still owns the content. That’s the difference between a habit and a preference. Moreover, it’s the difference between a general business strategy and a founder’s personal to-do list.
Me: Is there a risk of overengineering, though? Turning strategy into a bureaucratic exercise nobody enjoys?
Grace: Absolutely, and I’ve seen that failure mode too. Typically, it happens when a company hires someone from a much bigger firm who imports their entire operating system wholesale. A forty-person company doesn’t need the strategic planning apparatus of a Fortune 500. So take the OKR checkpoint, the quarterly review, and the calendar protection, but keep them lightweight. You want a habit that survives a bad week, not a process so heavy it collapses the first time someone calls in sick.
Habit #6: Steal the practice, not the whole playbook
Me: That’s a good segue. Many business owners read about what a huge company does and try to copy it wholesale. What goes wrong there?
Grace: Mostly, context goes missing. Picture a company with a dedicated strategy team, a fully built-out tech stack, and a hundred people focused on operational rigor. Its practices won’t transplant cleanly into a ten-person business where the founder also answers support tickets. For instance, I’ve watched founders copy a big consulting firm’s annual strategic planning offsite, and it just doesn’t fit. Wrong scale, wrong resourcing, wrong stakes.
Instead, I tell people to steal the underlying practice, not the specific implementation. Behind a big company’s strategic offsite sits a simple practice: periodically step back from operations and interrogate the plan with fresh eyes. You can do that in an afternoon with three people and a whiteboard. In other words, you don’t need a facilitator, an advance survey, and a two-day agenda to get the real value.
Me: So the habit transfers even when the exact process doesn’t.
Grace: Exactly, and that’s the whole idea behind “stealing” habits instead of copying strategies. Every general business strategy is specific to a company’s situation. A habit, however, is portable: reviewing honestly, setting goals you can fail, protecting your attention, delegating on purpose, and making big calls carefully and small calls fast. That’s what actually travels from one business to another.
What to do with your general business strategy in the next two weeks
Pick one habit and put a real date on it
Me: Let’s end practically. Someone reading this agrees with everything and wants to start now, not “next quarter” in some abstract sense. What do they do this week?
Grace: Pick one habit, just one, not all six. Then put it on the calendar before you close this article. Skip vague promises like “I’ll start doing quarterly reviews.” Instead, set an actual date, send an actual invite, and name an actual owner. For the review, block ninety minutes three weeks from now and write down three honest questions you’ll ask. For calendar protection, block your first deep work window tomorrow morning. Then tell whoever manages your schedule it’s non-negotiable, just like a client meeting.
Ultimately, that’s how a general business strategy really gets built: one dated calendar entry at a time, not one big planning document.
Then check whether it actually happened
Next comes the part people skip. Put a second date on the calendar to check whether you actually did it. Not whether it worked yet, just whether it happened. After all, people abandon habits in the “did I even try” phase far more often than they fail in the “did it produce results” phase. So solve for showing up first. Results come after you’ve proven to yourself you’ll actually run the play.
Me: Last question. If someone does exactly one of these six things this quarter and nothing else, which one moves the needle most?
Grace: The quarterly review, without question. Once you start honestly reviewing what’s happening in the business, you’ll discover you need everything else: the goals, the calendar discipline, the delegation, the decision making. In that sense, the review is the habit that generates the other habits. It also generates the rest of your general business strategy. Start there.
Key General Business Strategy Takeaways
Strategy that survives past January isn’t a document. Instead, a general business strategy worth keeping is a small set of repeatable habits:
- An honest quarterly review
- Goals with real teeth
- Protected time for actual thinking
- Delegation done on purpose
- A short list of decisions worth agonizing over
- Practices that outlast any one person’s memory
Pick one, put a real date on it, and check back to see whether it happened before worrying about whether it worked.
General Business Strategy FAQ
What is a general business strategy, in plain terms?
A general business strategy is the overall approach a company takes to reach its long-term goals. It covers where to compete, how to allocate limited resources, and what to prioritize when everything feels urgent. For a deeper definition and how it differs from tactics, see What Is Business Strategy? A Clear Guide for Future Business Leaders.
How often should a small business review its strategy?
Quarterly is the most common rhythm, with lighter checkpoints every two weeks to confirm goals still make sense. For a practical walkthrough of running these reviews well, see How to Conduct Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs).
Are OKRs only for large companies?
No. Large tech companies popularized them, but the framework scales down well. In fact, smaller businesses often benefit more, since a small, aligned team moves faster once everyone shares the same key results. See Why Business Owners Need OKRs and OKRs: The Ultimate Guide to Objectives and Key Results for a full breakdown.
What’s the biggest mistake business owners make with strategic planning?
They copy the exact process a much larger company uses instead of adapting the underlying practice to their own size and resources. As a result, heavy processes tend to collapse the first time things get busy. Aim for a lightweight habit that survives a bad week.
How do I know if I’m delegating effectively?
Check whether you hand off tasks with enough context for someone to succeed at roughly your own quality bar. Also check your reason for delegating. Ideally, it should build capability in your team, not just clear your own plate. For more on this distinction, see Effective Delegation: A Leader’s Time Management Tool.
What did Peter Drucker mean by “effective executive”?
Drucker argued that effectiveness is a learnable set of practices, not a personality trait. Those practices include knowing where your time goes, focusing on contribution over effort, and making a few decisions well rather than many decisions quickly. Read the original framing in What Makes an Effective Executive.
References
- Harvard Business Review. What Makes an Effective Executive. https://hbr.org/2004/06/what-makes-an-effective-executive
- Indeed. How to Conduct Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs). https://www.indeed.com
- U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Why Business Owners Need OKRs. https://www.uschamber.com
- Atlassian. OKRs: The Ultimate Guide to Objectives and Key Results. https://www.atlassian.com
- Google re:Work. Guides: Set goals with OKRs. https://rework.withgoogle.com
- Leaders.com. Effective Delegation: A Leader’s Time Management Tool. https://leaders.com
- StealthAgents Research. Executive Time-Blocking Statistics 2026: How Leaders Protect Focus Time and Deep Work. https://stealthagents.com
- ESCP Business School. What Is Business Strategy? A Clear Guide for Future Business Leaders. https://escp.eu