Roundabout Success: The Strategic Power of the Indirect Path

The fastest way to win is rarely a sprint down the middle. Across war, business, and even sports, enduring victories are often earned by taking a route your opponent didn’t prepare to defend. The indirect path avoids head-on collisions, discovers spaces others ignore, and aligns resources behind a new definition of success. This article distills a pattern that connects ancient strategy, modern market creation, disruptive innovation, and a low-budget baseball revolution—showing how to choose your battles, shape the field, and arrive first by seeming to come from the side.

Long before markets, generals understood a simple truth: direct confrontation is costly, predictable, and often unwinnable. Smart commanders conceal intent, create uncertainty, and concentrate force where the enemy is weak. They move through undefended ground, force rivals to divide their attention, and strike swiftly where resistance is thinnest.
In strategic terms, the indirect path changes the geometry of the fight. When you redefine where and how the battle happens, you make an opponent’s advantages—scale, reputation, or position—less relevant. The goal isn’t evasion; it’s decisive engagement on your terms.

In business, the most powerful form of indirectness is market creation—sidestepping head-to-head competition by redefining value. Instead of choosing between being the cheapest or the most distinctive, market creators do both: they lower costs by cutting what buyers don’t value and raise what buyers crave but can’t get.
This isn’t guesswork. It’s disciplined reframing. Tools such as the Strategy Canvas and Four Actions Framework help leaders see where the industry over- and under-serves customers, then systematically recompose the offering to open uncontested space.

New demand often lives in the gaps between established price–performance tiers. To find those seams, study why buyers abandon one tier for another. What benefits pull them upward? What compromises push them downward?
Winning plays have combined the emotional appeal or performance of a high tier with the durability, simplicity, or price of a low tier. That’s how categories like affordable-luxury apparel and portable personal audio were born: hybrid offerings that hit overlooked sweet spots where incumbents weren’t looking.

An indirect path still needs direct economics. For a market-creating move to succeed, three propositions must lock together: value (why buyers switch), profit (how you make money at scale), and people (why those executing the strategy believe and commit). Miss any one and you get either a bright idea that loses money or a sound plan that never leaves the slide deck.
Crucially, this alignment differs from traditional, head-to-head positioning. In market creation, you’re building a different equation—one that simultaneously lifts buyer value and lowers your cost structure—so incentives, pricing, and operating models must be tuned to that dual goal.

Even the best indirect strategy fails if your organization can’t or won’t execute it. Leaders who pull off big shifts break the problem down into concrete, local goals—so each unit sees a task they can own—and they preempt resistance by enlisting insiders who can surface saboteurs and social proof.
They also neutralize external politics by building broad coalitions, and they starve objections with facts. When new reporting was attacked as burdensome, for instance, demonstrating its minimal time cost defused the pushback. Momentum compounds when the path feels achievable and opposition loses oxygen.

Disruptive plays rarely start where the money is today. They begin in markets incumbents dismiss, with metrics that don’t fit the old scorecard. That’s why they need autonomy—from margin expectations, processes, and power structures—and why survival depends less on nailing the perfect plan than on conserving resources to iterate into the right one.
Teams that burn their budgets building for an imagined mass market die before discovering where demand actually emerges. Those that keep costs low, test in small markets, and pivot quickly can be wrong for a while and still end up right.

In the early 2000s, the Oakland A’s faced a structural disadvantage: a tiny payroll in a league where star talent concentrated in big markets. A head-on spending fight was impossible. So the front office asked a different question: What does the game actually reward per dollar spent?
By privileging on-base percentage over traditional scouting heuristics like body type or raw speed, the A’s targeted players the market mispriced. They even told a prolific base-stealer to stop risking outs—trading spectacle for runs. On draft day, they chose hitters with unfashionable physiques but elite plate discipline, buying production others overlooked.
The results were a proof-of-concept for the indirect path: 103 regular-season wins on a budget, achieved by exploiting a pricing inefficiency the rest of the league had normalized. The A’s didn’t just play better baseball; they redefined where advantage lived and made rivals’ resources less decisive by changing the terms of competition.

• Map the battlefield: inventory rivals’ defended positions versus open ground. Your goal is not evasion but leverage—where can a small shove tip a big structure?
• Redraw value: build a Strategy Canvas against both direct and indirect alternatives; use Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create to craft a lower-cost, higher-value curve.
• Hunt the seam: analyze when and why customers trade up or down; prototype hybrid offerings that resolve their trade-offs.
• Align the economics: design for the price corridor of the mass and ensure your cost structure can profit at it; lock incentives to the new curve.
• Organize to learn: protect a small, autonomous unit with permission to iterate; conserve cash for multiple pivots.
• Win the rollout: translate ambition into granular goals, isolate predictable blockers, and build coalitions that make opposition expensive to sustain.