Key Points

  1. Dr. Ahmed Sobhy Hamido argues in an Alborsaanews column that strategy is simply knowing where you are, where you want to go, how to get there, and how to verify you are on track.
  2. He contends that strategy became wrongly associated with thick documents and long meetings, when its real essence is five basic questions anyone can ask.
  3. The column warns that traditional five- and ten-year plans are increasingly fragile because the internet, COVID-19 and AI have compressed the time it takes for markets and customer needs to shift.

The Cairo-to-Alexandria Test: How One Columnist Defines Strategy

In a column published by Alborsaanews, Dr. Ahmed Sobhy Hamido takes on one of the most overused words in business: strategy. His starting observation is cultural rather than technical — the word itself intimidates people. It conjures images of consultants, lengthy meetings and binders nobody reads. Hamido's counter-argument is that strategy is actually far simpler than that reputation suggests, and far more important than the mystique allows.

He illustrates the point with a deliberately ordinary scenario: you are in Cairo and you want to reach Alexandria. The first question is where you are right now. The second is where you want to go. The third — and the one people skip — is how you will get there, which route is best, and how you will know you are still heading in the right direction. Those questions, Hamido writes, are the essence of strategy. He lays them out as five steps: understand your current position, including strengths, weaknesses and competitive standing; define the goal and distinguish it from mere ambition, a gap he calls Gap Analysis; identify the strategic alternatives available; compare their costs and risks to pick the most suitable one; and finally set milestones and performance indicators to confirm real progress rather than wishful arrival.

The column then shifts from definition to disruption. Strategy, Hamido notes, was long tied to five- and ten-year plans written as if the world would hold still until the document was fully executed. Factories were stable, markets moved slowly, and a good plan could survive years before needing serious revision. That world is gone. The internet produced companies that did not previously exist and pushed out others that had big names and large market shares. COVID-19 accelerated the shift, and artificial intelligence has compressed work that once took years of analysis into far shorter cycles.

Hamido is careful not to declare strategy dead. His argument is the opposite: strategy matters more than ever, but it must be built for a world in constant motion. A plan written today and imposed unchanged for five years is no longer sufficient, because customer needs, technologies, competitors, financing costs and market rules can all shift underneath it. The real test, he suggests, is whether an organization is willing to revisit its assumptions when reality changes — or whether it clings to a plan simply because of the time already invested in writing it.

Why Hamido Says Five-Year Plans Are Obsolete

What Hamido Is Really Arguing

The column is not a how-to guide so much as a corrective to how strategy is practiced in many organizations. Hamido's five questions — where are we, where do we want to be, how do we get there, which route is best, how do we know we are on track — map closely onto standard strategic planning frameworks, but his framing strips away the consultant vocabulary that often obscures them. The implicit critique is that many organizations treat the production of a strategy document as the goal, rather than the continuous process of positioning and adjustment it is meant to be.

The Gap Analysis Point

One of the more practical observations in the column is the distinction between what an organization actually achieves and what it aspires to achieve. Hamido calls the difference the "gap" and invokes Gap Analysis by name. For executives, this is a reminder that ambition without a measured baseline is not strategy — it is wishful thinking. The gap between current performance and desired performance is what any credible plan must close, and it can only be quantified if the current position is honestly assessed.

Why the Five-Year Plan Critique Matters Now

Hamido's argument that five- and ten-year plans have become fragile is not new, but the specific drivers he cites — the internet, the pandemic and the rapid adoption of AI in business — give it contemporary weight. For context, the compression of planning cycles is a widely observed trend across industries: companies in technology, retail and financial services have moved toward rolling forecasts and scenario planning, while longer-horizon capital decisions increasingly build in explicit review points. Hamido's contribution is to frame this as a mindset question rather than a methodology question: will leaders revise their assumptions when the facts change, or defend a plan because of sunk effort?

The Sunk-Cost Trap He Names

The column's sharpest passage asks what happens when reality diverges from the plan. Do you hold on because of the time invested in preparing it, or do you acknowledge the change, revisit your assumptions and adjust course? This is the sunk-cost fallacy applied to corporate planning, and Hamido presents it as the decisive test of whether an organization is genuinely strategic or merely administratively committed to a document. For managers, the practical implication is that review mechanisms — the milestones and performance indicators he mentions — need to be designed to trigger revision, not just to report progress.

What the Column Does Not Cover

Hamido's piece is deliberately conceptual and does not name specific companies, industries or markets, nor does it offer data on planning-cycle lengths or failure rates. Readers looking for sector-specific guidance or case studies will not find them here. The value is in the framing: a plain-language restatement of what strategy is for, and a warning that the pace of external change has outrun the traditional planning calendar.