Yes, Hope Is a Strategy

“Hope is not a strategy.” That phrase, attributed to General Gordon R. Sullivan, has been passed around boardrooms and business schools for decades. It’s usually said with a shrug, a knowing smile, and an implied lesson: that serious people make plans, not wishes. When I mention it in my classes at the Haas School of Business, I see my MBA students nod. They’ve heard it from venture capital mentors or read it in startup blogs. Hope, in their training, belongs to the realm of naïveté.

I understand why the phrase endures. Hope, on its surface, looks like soft thinking. It can seem vague, emotional, even unmeasurable—the opposite of what a spreadsheet or a pitch deck demands. But the longer I’ve worked with entrepreneurs and creatives, the clearer it’s become to me that the people who build lasting ventures and meaningful work all rely on hope. They just don’t call it that. They call it vision, resilience, faith in the process. Whatever the name, hope is the fuel that keeps them iterating when the metrics lag behind the mission.

Every entrepreneur begins with hope. There is no data for what has never been done before. There are only projections, prototypes, and imagination. If you strip hope away from innovation, all you have left is replication—businesses that repeat what already exists. Hope is the origin point of strategy because it is the one resource that allows you to imagine a future different from the present. Without it, you cannot lead, only manage.

I tell my students that hope, when practiced properly, is operational. It functions like a renewable energy source. You begin with a sense of possibility, translate that into goals, and test it through disciplined experimentation. Hope directs the creative impulse toward measurable results. The best founders, artists, and leaders do not merely feel hopeful; they work their hope. They turn aspiration into design, into hiring plans, into prototypes and proofs of concept. Hope is the reason they’re willing to keep showing up when logic says they shouldn’t.

When I work with startup teams, I can tell within minutes whether hope is alive in the room. You can hear it in the way people talk about their customers. A hopeful team stays curious; a hopeless one defends. Hopeful teams ask, “What might we learn next?” Hopeless teams say, “That’s not in the budget.” One lives in growth, the other in survival. The irony is that the hopeful team, though riskier on paper, is often the one that endures. They make better decisions because they can still imagine success.

In creative industries, hope is no less vital. Every artist, musician, or writer begins a project with no guarantee that it will find an audience. The act of creation itself is a form of hope: a declaration that the work will connect, that it will mean something to someone else. I’ve seen what happens when that hope collapses. The work becomes mechanical. People stop experimenting. They start repeating the safest version of themselves, and their art flattens into product.

Hope is also inseparable from sustainability. A creative life—or any life built on self-directed work—demands durability. You must pace your energy, plan your resources, and protect your time. Hope without structure burns out. Structure without hope ossifies. The two together form a stable system. That’s the secret of long careers in art, entrepreneurship, or leadership: people learn to operationalize hope. They convert belief into daily rhythm.

When my MBA students present their final projects, I always listen for the tone beneath the numbers. Some teams deliver immaculate spreadsheets and bulletproof forecasts, yet I know they won’t last a year because I can’t feel their conviction. Others stand there with half-finished prototypes, still refining, still discovering, and I can sense their trajectory: They believe in what they’re building. That belief isn’t irrational; it’s disciplined hope. It’s what allows them to persist long enough to get the data the skeptics demanded at the start.

Hope is a strategy because it aligns imagination with effort. It gives people permission to continue, and it keeps systems human. Without hope, leadership becomes management of decline. With it, leadership becomes stewardship of possibility. Every innovation, from a startup to a symphony, begins as an act of hope backed by skill and persistence.

The old military aphorism meant well. In combat, hope alone can be fatal. But in creativity and entrepreneurship, hope is essential. It’s not the substitute for strategy; it’s the seed from which all strategy grows. As I tell my students, if you don’t have hope, you don’t have a venture—you have an algorithm. And no algorithm, no matter how optimized, has ever imagined a future worth living in.