Strategy

At work, strategy means connecting daily decisions to a long-term direction, and deciding on purpose what the team will not do, so effort goes where it counts most.

Most of what a company decides happens in small moments, like a discount to close one deal or a request that fits nobody’s plan. Strategy is what keeps those choices pointed the same way, instead of pulling the company in ten directions.

In daily work, it shows in how a person explains their work. They can name the company’s main priorities, and say which one their current project serves. When they plan, they move in a clear order, from looking at the situation to the plan to the work itself.

As the Skill grows, the person brings structure to bigger choices. They look at a market or a product line for its strengths and weak spots before committing. They also think one step past the obvious, like how a price change will affect the customers who stay as well as the ones who leave.

At the top of the scale, Strategy shapes how a whole company thinks. A leader writes a decision framework that other leaders borrow for their own planning, and redefines what the company is for when the old premise stops working.

Where it shows up

A family-owned print shop has done a bit of everything for twenty years: business cards, flyers, wedding invitations and the occasional store sign. Its sales are steady, but the margins on cards and flyers keep shrinking, because online printers set the price.

At the yearly planning meeting, the general manager asks the team to picture the shop three years out. Online printers will keep getting cheaper on standard jobs. What they can’t do is print a large sign overnight and send someone to hang it the next morning.

So she chooses. The shop will be the place local businesses call for signs and event graphics. It will still print cards, at its own price, but it stops chasing online offers. To pay for a large-format printer and a part-time installer, it sells one of its two small presses.

The choice reaches the Monday meeting too. Every new quote gets one question: does it fit where we’re going? The sales calls now go to businesses about to open a new location.

Two years later, signs and event graphics bring in more than half the shop’s revenue, at better margins than cards ever had.

Strategy was choosing where the shop could win and giving up the rest on purpose, then making that choice part of every Monday.

What it changes at work

A plan for the year is easy to write. The hard part is making a week’s worth of small decisions serve it.

In May 2024, McKinsey published a survey of 617 managers and executives at companies with more than $500 million in revenue, run in October 2023. Organizations that respondents said put long-term value first were much more likely to turn their strategic goals into an actual plan and budget. They were also almost two times more likely to outperform competitors on growth and return on capital.

The companies that did better were the ones connecting today’s decisions to where they want to be in a few years. That’s the work of Strategy, and it shows up in numbers a company can measure.

What it looks like, from 0 to 20

Skill Deck maps Strategy across 21 levels, from 0 to 20, each one a Practice with a name and an example. Three of them, from one person’s to-do list to a whole industry:

10, Strategic Discipline

Turns down busy work that doesn't serve the team's targets, and explains the reason so the request is withdrawn rather than resented.

14, Cross-Functional Calibration

Maps how a plan in their area will land on another department, and gets that department's support before the plan starts.

19, Sector Disruption

Proposes a new business model that forces competitors to change how they work, and gets the budget moved behind it.

In Skill Deck, the level comes from the meetings a person already attends, in how they tie today’s choices to where the team is going.

One thing to try if you want to develop this Skill

We recommend starting with Practice 8, Trend Awareness. It’s about looking up from the work.

1. Think of the last change you noticed in your market, like a competitor that started offering free delivery.
2. Before your next team meeting, write down one question about it that looks a year ahead.

The news is the same in both versions. Only the second turns it into a choice the team can still make.

Afterward, see whether the question changed anything on the team’s list. If it did, even a small item, the team has started planning ahead of the market instead of behind it.