Synthesizing Rumelt's Good Strategy Bad Strategy, Lafley/Martin's Playing to Win, Porter, and Sun Tzu, Janakiraman argues a good strategy always has three explicit components: (1) a handful of strategic pillars — the focus areas where the team concentrates resources; (2) explicit non-focus areas — things the team deliberately chooses not to do, stated out loud rather than left implicit; and (3) the "why" behind both — the reasoning that makes the choice look inevitable rather than arbitrary.
Missing any one produces a plan that looks like strategy but isn't: pillars without stated non-focus areas invite scope creep back in; pillars without a stated why can't survive a skeptical stakeholder or a change in circumstances. This definition is the yardstick the rest of the Present Forward: A Five-Phase Process for Problem-Focused Strategy is built to satisfy — Strategy Sprint Day 2: Problem Clustering, Reframing, and Pillar Ranking exists specifically to down-select to a small number of pillars, and the strategy document exists to write the why down.
Related framings of the same underlying discipline: Focus + Transparency + Placing a Bet (Strategy Quality Rubric), Strategy's Three-Part Structure: Where We Are / Where We're Going / How.