Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson has written a very sage post called, 'Get The Strategy Right And The Execution Is Easy.' The notion is simple, obvious and profound at the same time. While a lot of us come from the school of “work hard and surround yourself with smart people and you will succeed,” in practice, we're often pursuing the wrong strategy, or inattentive to what the RIGHT strategy is.
By focusing on and doing the analysis around the meta question of strategy, execution becomes easy. Why? Because it aligns your company, employees, customers and investors around what the company is trying to do, and what it is explicitly not trying to do, which means they can be focused and efficient in their work.
I would add to this notion that there is a subtle truth in this that a VC friend once conveyed. He was always challenging entrepreneurs by asking, "Where's the current? Birds don't fly because they flap their wings. They fly because they find the current, and let it carry them aloft higher."
Strategy, thus, is at a base level, finding and figuring out the current, and how to manifest it to carry you aloft.