A few months ago, I had dinner in Chicago with some friends including "Eric," a fan of my Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights series on the Medium platform with whom I had corresponded before.

This was the first time we met in person. The discussion at dinner had touched on what to do about people who get so deeply entrenched in a position that they are unwilling to contemplate anything else. My assertion was that anyone who is entirely uninfluenceable should live as a hermit, because they cannot be a productive member of society. Being alone would be best for both the individual and society — a strong claim to be sure. Eric and others at the table were intrigued and encouraged me to write about it. I am doing so because the topic relates to the practice of strategy. I will begin by looking at influenceability through a societal lens and then move to strategy — i.e., from the general to the specific.

 

Influenceability and society

Society is what we construct when individual people in it interact with one another. When they interact, they influence one another and that pattern of interaction and influence shapes society. Sometimes the influence is subtle; maybe you learn something you didn’t know from someone at a dinner party and adjust your opinion a bit. Sometimes it is less subtle — a lightbulb goes on in your mind during a classroom lecture.

People who are completely uninfluenceable cannot participate in this societal building and shaping process. By definition, they can’t learn and get completely stuck. You could argue that they contribute by stating their uninfluenceable position to others; but that has limited utility. It is a frozen message. It doesn’t get any better. Whatever you heard the first time will remain the same — and people will quickly tune it out.

If you are uninfluenceable, you can’t be a contributor to a healthy, progressing society because members of a society advance one another and society as a whole by exchanging ideas with one another and coming to better understandings.

On this front, I am greatly influenced by my favourite philosopher, Aristotle, who is in some ways the king of influenceability. He exalted the discipline of rhetoric and his writing on the subject is compiled in a book of the same name. Unfortunately, this subject is largely overlooked and remains untaught in modern educational life. In modernity, rhetoric has come to mean some combination of bombast and grandiloquence; but Aristotle viewed it as a valuable and highly skilled activity. According to him, rhetoric entails citizens putting forth their arguments for the best way forward and, based on the back-and-forth of that discussion, choosing the path for which the discussants judge the logic to be most compelling. The better the arguments, the higher the quality of the discussion and the more likely that the chosen direction will be fruitful — or at least the best society can come up with at that point in time. In my experience, the chosen direction is rarely based on the precise initial argument of a single participant. Rather, the discussion strengthens the argumentation and builds new, better answers — and with that, a better society. This is consistent with the findings of my 20-plus years of work on Integrative Thinking. I have found that valuable breakthroughs that overcome apparently irresolvable trade-offs consistently take the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models but is superior to each. That is, great ideas don’t come from a vacuum, from a blank sheet of paper or from a singular idea. They come from building a new model from pieces of existing models. But the only way for that to happen is to accept that, even if you disagree with or despise an opposing model, it just might contain elements that would help you and your colleagues build something better than your own model.

That is the power of rhetoric as conceived of by Aristotle — and it is the reason why you need to be influenceable to be useful to society. This is why I am not a fan of strict constructionism in the realm of law.

For example, for a strict constructionist, the Constitution of the United States says X, and therefore, by strict reading, Y is true. If you genuinely believe that you can determine exactly what was meant by words that were written by anybody else — let alone by a group of people 239 years ago — you are uninfluenceable. Life doesn’t work that way. Everything, including taking meaning from words in the U.S. Constitution, is an act of interpretation. And to be useful to the world, interpretation needs to be influenceable. Your interpretation needs to be subject to augmentation through argumentation. If you start from the perspective that your interpretation isn’t one of many possible ones but rather the only proper meaning, you are delusional and unhelpful to society.

 

Why this matters for strategy

Influenceability is important to contemplate in the realm of strategy because strict constructionism dominates in its modern practice. The mantra is, do the analysis and then do what the analysis says. Anything else is considered to be negligent and abhorrent. The analysis is viewed as providing "the right answer."

If you don’t concur, you are an anti-analysis business floozy. And that reinforces the dominant culture. My experience with executives over many years is that under this strict constructionist regime, they tend to become more uninfluenceable as their careers progress. They get more inclined to say things like, "I know this business: this is the way it is always done," and "The analysis agrees with me, so this is what we are going to do." This approach is fundamentally anti-Aristotelian. This way of thinking doesn’t lead to imagining possibilities and choosing the one for which the most compelling argument can be made, which requires influenceability. It is one of the main reasons why executives are so disappointed with the pace and level of innovation in their organizations. Their strict constructionism doesn’t allow innovation to happen.

Influenceability leads to harnessing the best interpretations and thinking patterns from groups of colleagues. It directs teams away from strict constructionism, not towards it like a moth to the flame, and that makes for better strategy. It enables members of teams to ask what would have to be true (WWHTBT) rather than obsessing about what is true. It enables them to gain confidence in creating outcomes that don’t yet exist. Influenceability is central to this.

As an imperfect creature, I myself am always susceptible to uninfluenceability. But I am cognizant of the danger and for that reason, I try as hard as I can to be influenceable. My greatest learnings have always occurred when I have been influenceable. I have worked hard to integrate aspects of many models into the model that I currently use to solve business (and other) problems. And I plan to never stop integrating.

 

Practitioner insights

I can already imagine some of the responses to this article. You are arguing that one shouldn’t have a point of view. Just do what everybody says. You are suggesting being an intellectual milquetoast.

I can see that reaction. But that is not the practitioner insight from this piece.

Rather, my advice is that you should have strong convictions, loosely held, to quote an old saying. With respect to the strong convictions part, it is super-important, if not essential, to have a point of view.

You can’t be a useful strategist without strong convictions. I haven’t met any strategist in my 45 years of strategy work who is any good without having strong convictions. Good strategists have carefully thought about the problem they are trying to solve, come up with possibilities for making it go away, reverse-engineered the logic, explored the barriers to choice, and arrived at a conviction on the best way forward. But on the loosely held front, the smartest of strategists always test that conviction against the logic and conviction of others.

Former Procter & Gamble CEO AG Lafley — one of the best strategists with whom I have had the pleasure of working — always did this, whether with me, one or more of his colleagues or even his (and my) late friend Peter Drucker.

The fact is, you can productively test your convictions at every step — your definition of the problem, your possibilities, etc. In my experience, this will make your eventual conclusion better — much better. But the only way for this to systematically happen is to remain committed to influenceability. If you decide to be uninfluenceable because you believe that when you come to a conclusion, you are correct, the world would be better off if you were alone on an island. And that would be better for you, too, because you’d have plenty of time to remind yourself just how right you are.

This article originally appeared in the winter 2026 issue of the Rotman Management magazine.