WeWork raised $12.8 billion on the strategic premise that it was a technology company rather than a real estate business.

It was a where-to-be-valued choice — a strategy worded carefully so that nobody could ever prove it wrong, right up until the market proved it wrong in eight weeks.

When the IPO process forced honest scrutiny in 2019, the valuation dropped from $47 billion to under $8 billion. The strategy had not failed.

It had never existed.

What existed was an aspiration dressed in tech slang. And renting desks by the month is a real estate business, regardless of how many kombucha taps you install.

Nobody mentioned this in the strategy sessions. This is not that kind of meeting.

What WeWork should have done was connect the aspiration to an honest logic for winning. 

A real estate company with a strong brand, a superior product, and a compelling customer experience is a viable and valuable strategy.

A real estate company pretending to be a tech company to access tech valuations is a strategy worded carefully so that nobody can ever prove it wrong.

The test was simple: read the strategy statement and ask whether it could survive contact with someone not financially incentivised to believe it.

The sentence that could not survive that test was not the strategy.

It was the problem.