Put that on a t-shirt
If you’ve spent time in corporate life, you know the moment. A new initiative lands. The energy is high. Someone says it — half joking, half serious — and you can almost see the branded hoodies in your mind.
“Put that on a t-shirt.”
Said, at some point, by nearly every CEO.
Most people cringe when this is suggested. It can feel reductive. As if taking something complex and turning it into a slogan cheapens it.
But I’ve seen it be genuinely productive — especially when an organization is trying to change behavior.
When a company is just beginning to formalize strategy — when a founder’s vision is still mostly living in their own head — the challenge isn’t intelligence. It’s shared interpretation.
How do you turn one person’s clarity into something the group can actually use?
I recently read an HBR article titled, “Your Strategy Needs a Visual Metaphor” that outlined asimple test for metaphors like this — what they called the 4 F’s:
Fit
Familar
Fresh
Facilitate
The metaphor has to fit the leadership style and culture. It has to feel familiar but still fresh. And it has to facilitate understanding — meaning it actually helps people make decisions.
The “fit” piece is where I see a lot of organizations stumble. Founders often choose the metaphor that excites them. But the point isn’t to energize yourself. It’s to give the team a shared lens. If it doesn’t resonate with how they experience the work, it won’t stick.
“Familiar” matters too. If you have to spend five minutes explaining the metaphor before you can explain the strategy, you’ve lost the room.
“Fresh” matters — but not in a gimmicky way. (Please don’t choose mountains. Every company has “climbed a mountain.”)
And “facilitate” is the real test. Does it actually help people decide? Or is it just decorative language?
About ten years ago, I saw this done well. We were entering a phase of scale that required unusual focus. Everything felt urgent. The founder printed t-shirts with an elephant and a fly.
The message was simple: focus on the elephants — the big, strategic initiatives — and stop chasing the small flies.
When someone drifted into the small, urgent tasks that easily became distractions, someone else would just say, “Fly.”
No deck. No debate. Just clarity.
The visual made the tradeoff obvious. It turned a strategic priority into something we could recognize in real time.
That’s when I stopped rolling my eyes at the t-shirts. Because the goal was never the slogan. It was giving the organization a shared way to decide.
Strategy doesn’t live in the deck. It lives in the shorthand people use when they’re choosing what to do next.
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