Here is an excerpt from an article written by Roger L. Martin for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

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The senior team of a large player in the global wealth management business recently asked me for my opinion on their strategy. They had worked long and hard at coming up with it. Their “Where to Play” choice was to target wealthy individuals who wanted and were willing to pay for comprehensive wealth management services. Their “How to Win” choice was to provide great customer service across the breadth of their wealth management needs. I pushed and probed, but that was it.

Sadly, like the majority of strategies that I read, this firm’s strategy failed my sniff test and for that reason I would bet overwhelmingly that it will fail in the market as well. The test I apply is quite simple. I look at the core strategy choices and ask myself if I could make the opposite choice without looking stupid. For my wealth managers, the opposite of their “where” choice was to target poor individuals who don’t want and aren’t willing to pay for comprehensive wealth management services. The opposite of their “how” is to provide crappy customer service.

The point is this: If the opposite of your core strategy choices looks stupid, then every competitor is going to have more or less the exact same strategy as you. That means that you are likely to be indistinguishable from your competitors and the only way you will make a decent return is if the industry currently happens to be highly attractive structurally. The wealth management company was targeting the exact same clients as every single global competitor and, like every other global competitor, they planned on giving them “great service.”

There are many, many such strategies. Perhaps the two most popular “strategies” are service excellence and operational effectiveness. All that can be said about them is that they are non-stupid and that is hardly an exemplary level of accomplishment.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Roger L. Martin is the former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a coauthor of Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013) and a director of the Skoll Foundation.