What Mr. Beast Taught Me About Executing Strategy
Why Strategy Execution is Not Just About Strategy or Execution, but Building Systems to Scale Your Effort.
For the last two years, I’ve been iterating on a new elective on “Strategy Execution” at Duke. Before designing this class, I taught “Core Strategy” in nearly all of Duke’s master’s programs over the years (MMS, WEMBA, GEMBA, Daytime, and even a PhD class on strategy). “Core” Strategy is conceptual and cerebral: it’s about invisible market forces, resources, capabilities, and, sometimes, other “special” topics like transaction costs. However, very little of our content focuses on how you take the “big” ideas and turn them into action. Into winning.
In fact, for many organizations, there is a gulf between “strategy” and “execution.” Strategy is “in the clouds.” Execution is “in the weeds.” Over the years, I’ve found that having conversations that bridge this gulf (“Strategic Execution”) is quite challenging because there is no natural language to connect big ideas to the work-to-be-done.
Anyway, the class is still a work in progress, but in designing it, I’ve talked to (and borrowed material) from colleagues at other schools who’ve taught the class (Thanks, Claudine!). I’ve also read nearly two dozen books, over 100 academic papers, countless news articles, and even a few Harvard case studies.
But one of the guilty pleasures of prepping this course has been watching lots (more than I’d like to admit to my children!) of YouTube videos.
What I Learned From MrBeast
And if you watch YouTube, you’ve probably heard of Mr. Beast, the 26-year-old YouTuber with the most followers—nearly 391 million. For the Indians reading this, the #2 channel is T-Series (with 293 million followers). T-Series is a major Indian music label with over 23k videos posted, billions of dollars in production costs, and a storied history. So when you compare T-Series’ #2 rank to Mr. Beast’s #1 rank (with 868 videos1 ), it’s EVEN more impressive.
If you’re anything like me, you’re probably wondering: how did MrBeast do it?
Luckily, YouTube recently recommended a phenomenal interview by Shaan Puri (a Duke Alum) and Sam Parr with James Donaldson (MrBeast). The interview is super well-done, and I highly recommend watching it.
As I listened to the interview, it was clear that MrBeast has thought rigorously about his economic engine and is comfortable in this liminal space between strategy and execution. He has a sharp and conceptually deep language for what he does.
The video is structured around a list (“MrBeast’s 10 Business Secrets”) that could easily serve as a syllabus for a class on strategy execution. In fact, it resembles much of the syllabus I have iterated toward over the past two years, with some points that I might include in the future after watching this video. Unfortunately, I don’t use Mr. Beast as a case study, but that will change (we discuss GM, Arizona State University, Apple, Uber, Kodak, etc.).
Before I dive into this list (and link it to some of the ideas in the strategy and economics literature), I want to show you a short clip from MrBeast’s channel from a decade ago—when he was 16 years old. On April 1, 2015. It’s titled “Making YouTube a Priority.” At this point, he had about 2000 subscribers and had been doing YouTube on-and-off for about two years.
A few quotes from this video are striking.
“I’m nothing as compared to the top tier YouTubers…”
“I’ve never fully committed…”
“I was thinking, I don’t want to be in the future, you know, like 10 years from now, and I don’t want to wonder how big can my YouTube channel have gotten if I had stuck with it…”
Its been almost exactly a decade: 2000 subscribers to 391,000,000.
MrBeast set an audacious goal, fully committed to it, and systematically built an execution engine to turn vision into reality.
Setting Ambitious Goals
Overcome Myopia to set a clear vision. As I watch this video, I have to put myself in the mindset of a 16-year-old boy in high school. That was me at one point in my life, in New Jersey. My view of the world was incredibly myopic. Maybe school, maybe friends—maybe a few other small things—were in my field of vision.
Now, here’s a 16-year-old boy in North Carolina who’s overcome significant myopia that comes from a lack of experience and that particular stage of life. He looked out at the world and saw what was possible: That there are people called top-tier YouTubers out there. And he decided: I have 2,000 subscribers now, but I could be one of the best, if not the best.
I think this is an underappreciated aspect of strategy execution. We need a vision to execute on, but we often set goals within the narrow confines of what we can readily observe in field of view. Bold visions require us to first overcome that myopia—as Levinthal and March have so elegantly written about their famous article “The Myopia of Learning.”
And it’s only with that broader frame that we can set truly ambitious goals. What’s out there? What is possible? Most of us don’t really know what’s possible—for ourselves, or for our companies.
Burn the Boats
Between commitment and flexibility, choose commitment. There is a strategic tension between making credible commitments (see Ghemawat’s Commitment: The Dynamics of Strategy), meaning committing to a course of action such as a vision, and developing the capabilities needed to execute on that vision. Strategy defines commitments as decisions that are difficult or costly to reverse (see also Van den Steen).
Commitments are fundamental because they force you to burn the boats, leaving no other choice but to pursue a particular path with a specific theory of how to succeed. The research on commitment as a strategic mechanism is well established, and commitments can lead to sustained competitive advantage for at least four reasons (see Pisano, 2022 for a review of Ghemawat’s ideas):
They create barriers to entry by making it harder for others to imitate or compete.
They signal to everyone, both internally and externally, that you are serious about this direction and willing to do what it takes to win.
They lock you into a specific path and force focus, rather than allowing constant shifts in strategy.
They push you to innovate and build capabilities around the commitments you have already made, which leads to powerful complementarities.
Of course, there are trade-offs. You might commit to the wrong direction. You might miss new opportunities. Commitment can also lead to inertia, making it difficult to adapt as the world changes.
But the key insight is this: while you might lose by committing, you may never win without it.
The Rule of 100
Incremental Improvement and Learning Curves. Many people believe that if they discover some “one weird trick” or a special aha moment where everything suddenly falls into place, they will unlock success. But they are fundamentally mistaken about the nature of production.
While it is true that 80 percent of what drives quality comes from a few big factors, those are usually obvious and easy for others to replicate. What drives the remaining 20 percent of performance comes from lots of little things, not one big breakthrough. And those little things are learned by doing.
The knowledge created through both experience and strategic investment in process innovation can lead to long-term competitive advantages. These small, subtle improvements are often invisible to outsiders because each one is minor on its own (see Hendel and Spiegel, 2014; Cohen and Klepper, 2000; Argote and Epple, 1990, and a LOT more) . But when there are a hundred small improvements working together, the total effect is powerful and very hard to copy. You have to do all of them to make it work.
My own research on A/B testing shows that firms that rigorously test even the smallest ideas consistently perform significantly better over time, increasing their page visits by over 100 percent in just 12 months. Incremental, compounding improvement can be a powerful source of long-term competitive advantage.
This is exactly why MrBeast’s idea: You should post 100 YouTube videos, each one with the goal of being slightly better than the last on a clear and measurable (even if small) dimension—can lead to massive differences in outcomes over time.
The Power of Ideas
Ideas and effort are superadditive. I think in the entrepreneurship literature, there is considerable debate over what matters more: ideas or founders. There is strong reason to believe that both play an important role in the success of a venture. Great founders who pursue weak ideas waste their time. Great ideas in the hands of mediocre people fail to go anywhere. So, it is clear that both elements are necessary. As a result, there are strong complementarities between ideas and people. In many cases, great individuals are better at selecting promising ideas and tend to find and match with one another.
In the context of the MrBeast interview, what stands out is his exceptional ability to generate ideas that go viral on YouTube. This capability has developed over many years and draws on a deep foundation of tacit knowledge that others typically lack. He can hear a simple word like “grandmother” and quickly imagine a concept that feels obviously engaging and likely to hold viewers’ attention.
This connects to a more foundational insight. If we hold constant the capabilities of a person or team, it becomes clear that success functions as a product, not a sum—X1 times X2, rather than X1 plus X2. When a team has strong capabilities, adding a high-quality idea greatly amplifies the result. For this reason, investing the time to reflect, think critically, and develop the judgment to recognize when an idea is worth pursuing becomes essential.
Although MrBeast’s process may appear intuitive, it likely relies on a schema he has developed over time. He seems to carry a structured, although implicit, causal model of what kinds of content will perform well. Moreover, it is not the average idea that drives performance. It’s the best idea. And the ability to identify the best idea is a central part of success.
Reaching this level of capability takes time, repeated effort, and focused development of the skills required to execute effectively. These skills involve subtle forms of knowledge and judgment and are built through experience. Once a team has developed these capabilities and committed fully to them, the selection of a truly exceptional idea can lead to dramatic improvements in performance.
Clone Yourself
Delegate. Delegate. Delegate. There is a new body of research suggesting that many people either avoid delegating or fail to delegate effectively. One excellent book that shaped my thinking on this topic is The E-Myth Revisited. It argues that one of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is assuming that being an entrepreneur is the same as being a craftsperson. Someone who is skilled at making cupcakes, for example, may not have the skills needed to run a successful cupcake business. Running a cupcake business means designing systems that allow other people to make cupcakes without relying on the original baker.
The ability to delegate effectively, or in MrBeast’s words, to clone yourself, requires a deep and nuanced understanding of your own work. You need to be clear about what you actually do and what information (and skills) someone else would need in order to do it the same way. This matters because the goal is for others to see the world as you do and to carry out tasks in the same manner. Many people lack this level of self-awareness.
McDonald’s provides a useful example. It functions as a massive delegation system where each franchise owner follows a standardized formula.
In some situations, you delegate to people who reach your level of skill very quickly and then go beyond it. That is when real progress happens. When your clones can create more clones, scale becomes possible.
To reach this point, it helps to reflect not only on the outcomes you seek but also on the actual steps you take to achieve them. Once you understand your own process, you can create an instruction manual for others to follow. If others cannot replicate your work entirely, then identify the key decision points where your unique insight, judgment, or tacit knowledge is essential. By placing yourself where you add the most value, the work can continue without depending entirely on your labor.
Impossible is Possible
Setting and executing on stretch goals. There is a large body of research on goal setting in management. I am not an expert in this field, but the evidence is clear: goals matter. They focus attention, drive effort, and encourage creativity in pursuit of achievement. Sometimes this happens at the cost of ethical behavior, but despite that, goals remain critical.
What about impossible goals? My colleague Sim Sitkin has written extensively on stretch goals, which are defined as “seemingly impossible goals.” His research shows that although stretch goals can be powerful, they are often adopted by the firms least equipped to achieve them. These are organizations that lack the necessary capabilities. On the other hand, firms that do possess strong capabilities often choose not to set such ambitious goals. My colleagues Wes Cohen, William Miles and Yoko Shibuya and their collaborator Matthew Higgins have shown that large and successful firms frequently default to setting incremental goals, and in many cases, there may be economic incentives that encourage this behavior.
Even so, the value of stretch goals points to a deeper insight about the relationship between effort and outcomes. Incremental goals often require proportional increases in effort. For example, if you want to increase sales by 20 percent, you may need to work 20 percent harder. However, if your goal is to increase sales tenfold, the same kind of effort will not be enough. You would need to rethink your entire approach to sales, e.g., your full production function.
This is the critical difference. Stretch goals force you to design entirely new systems. Regular goals push you to apply more effort to your existing systems.
Consultants are a Cheat Code
Leverage the market for expertise. Cloning yourself allows other people to benefit from your hard-earned knowledge and expertise because it becomes codified and transferable. In the same way, experts help solve problems that you face but do not have the skills or experience to address directly.
Expertise that comes from years or decades of focused effort, improvement, and lessons learned through experience creates a high barrier. It becomes very difficult for someone without that foundation to step in and handle the same challenges effectively. When a problem requires a solution now, and there is not enough time to build the necessary capabilities internally, the most practical and economical approach is to borrow outside expertise.
The cost of hiring an expert is often lower than the combined costs of delay, failure, and the effort it would take to build that knowledge internally. The expert's marginal cost of solving the problem is likely far lower than both the fixed and marginal costs involved in trying to reach that same level of proficiency yourself.
Although I have not read extensively on the academic research surrounding consultants, one strong example comes from a paper by Nick Bloom and his colleagues. They studied textile manufacturers in India that hired consultants from firms such as Accenture and McKinsey. The results showed clear improvements in performance, and those improvements continued well after the engagement ended. This supports the idea that well-matched external expertise can create lasting value.
Block Out the Noise
Surround yourself with the right people. Surround yourself with the right people. There is a large body of research on peer effects, and I have written several papers on this topic. When people are in the presence of others who are highly intelligent, deeply engaged, enthusiastic, or simply easy to work with, and when strong complementarities have developed between them, remarkable things can happen.
One of the most interesting findings in this area is that once people discover the right collaborators, they tend to stick together. They move from one company to another as a group. They continue to work on long-term projects together. It is not just that they have found the most talented individuals. More importantly, they have found the right people for their specific goals. Over time, they develop shared understanding, common capabilities, and the kind of alignment that allows them to collaborate with high efficiency.
Reinvest Everything
Scale in a way that no one can do what you do. Perhaps the final point is that if the system starts working, reinvest the proceeds. I am not a financial economist, so please do not take my advice on this one, but this seems logical. There is something that MrBeast can do because he is going to give a million dollars away—something the next YouTuber, who decides to buy two Ferraris with his winnings, will not be able to do. Strategic reinvestment is clearly important. Once you have built a phenomenal system with great people who know what they are doing, reinvesting within that system allows you to scale, potentially in a nonlinear way.
As a result, even if others copy every single element listed above, it would still be impossible to replicate what MrBeast is doing, because the scale at which he operates creates a fundamental gap. You might be doing everything right, but while you are giving away $1,000, MrBeast is giving away $1 million. At that scale, true competition becomes unreachable. Even if someone matches every step, the outcomes are no longer comparable.
Build the System
If there’s one key takeaway from teaching Strategy Execution and studying MrBeast’s success, it’s this: Build the system. Strategy execution is systems building. You have to design a machine where outcomes scale non-linearly with effort. The essential elements of this system? A bold vision, unwavering commitment, continuous improvement, ambitious goals, high-performance teams you can delegate to, and reinvestment to fuel scale.
With that, I’ll leave you with a final YouTube video from Jerry Seinfeld.
PS: Thank you to my daughter for generating the thumbnail for this post. :)
On May 6th, 2025
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Good post Sharique. A ton of thinking has gone into this writing. "consultant is cheat code" heading made me smile :)