Culture May Set the Table, But Strategy Decides Who Eats: The #1 Organizational Superpower for the Exponential Age
If Strategy Lives in a PowerPoint, Your Company Is Starving
Executive Summary: Strategy Is the Most Undervalued Skill in Your Company. Fix That, or Fail.
If you only have time for this paragraph, let it burn into your professional conscience: The companies that will dominate the next decade aren't those with the best culture, brand, or even technology. They are the ones with the clearest and most disciplined strategic competence. Strategy—done right—is not merely a planning exercise or a vision statement. It's a competitive weapon that requires trained professionals, continuous practice, and organizational muscle. Without it, even the best technology becomes a misfire, culture becomes incoherent, and execution becomes chaotic. The U.S. Army understands this, which is why it built a dedicated Strategist Corps to win in environments more volatile than any corporate boardroom.[1] It's time for corporate America to do the same.
Strategy: Not a Slide Deck, But a Superpower
Let’s clarify something: strategy isn’t your annual offsite with a catered lunch and buzzword bingo. It’s not the 87-slide deck you painfully present to a glazed-eyed executive team before everyone returns to ignoring it. Strategy is a living, breathing capability—a mental and organizational muscle that keeps you steady when the business world slips on the proverbial banana peel.
In my article titled Mastering Chaos: Organizational Superpowers for the Exponential Age, I list strategy as the #1 superpower.[2] That’s not hyperbole; that’s hierarchy. Above innovation. Above agility. Above Technology. And yes, Above culture. Why? Because without strategy, all that innovation, agility, technology along with the corporate culture end up spinning in circle; fast, expensive circles.
Roger Martin, co-author of Playing to Win, doesn’t mince words: "Strategy is choice. Strategy means saying no." And not the passive-aggressive corporate kind of "no" that means "maybe next quarter," we’re talking about clear, bold, and spine-in-place decision-making that carves out true advantage. Strategy drives unity of effort across the business, aligning everyone on clear priorities regarding what it means to win, how to win, and where to play.
Strategic Competency Is Built, Not Assumed
The U.S. Army doesn’t enter a campaign with a whiteboard, a budget, and an excess of optimism. It builds strategists. This is not just a function—it’s a deliberate organizational capability, deeply embedded and rigorously maintained. Strategic competency is cultivated throughout the force, not only among colonels and generals but also through a career-long investment in specialized talent. Senior commanders bring operational experience and leadership acumen, shaped by decades of progressive professional military education (PME). This career-long progression ensures officers transition from tactical executors to strategic thinkers capable of integrating military operations with national policy objectives. But senior commander’s strategic decisions at the higher echelons are made sharper—and more executable—through a powerful structural pairing: the FA59 Strategist Corps.
Think of the FA59s as the Army’s elite cadre of warfighting intellectuals. These officers don’t merely dabble in theory—they are rigorously trained in strategic history, international relations, and systems thinking. They specialize in bridging high-level intent with on-the-ground execution, ensuring the Army’s overall strategic function remains more than just a conceptual exercise. The real magic lies in the synergy: experienced senior commanders, who own strategic accountability, are paired with FA59s, who bring deep analytical and conceptual expertise to the fight. The result? A robust, resilient strategic function at the highest echelons—one that doesn’t just set direction but ensures the organization can follow through with coherence and force.
On Strategy: A Primer defines the strategist’s role as “providing narrative and concrete objectives to enable operational planning to synchronize tactical actions to orchestrate a strategic effect.” Translation: they make sure every bullet fired aligns with the outcome that matters. That alignment—of resources to goals, action to intention—is no accident. It’s a function of structure, skill, and shared accountability. Now imagine if every dollar your company spent was similarly aligned. Imagine your capital, headcount, and transformation initiatives not scattered across fiefdoms but marshaled toward a common strategic aim. That’s what it looks like when strategy isn’t just a slide deck—it’s a core capability.
The Corporate Blind Spot: Strategy Without Strength
The Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) is increasingly becoming a standard seat at the C-suite table, though in many organizations, strategy remains more of a corporate aspiration than a practiced discipline. This leaves CSOs in the delicate position of aligning disparate viewpoints—an exercise that often feels less like high-level planning and more like refereeing a polite intellectual tug-of-war.
For most CSOs, the role is shaped more by context than by textbook. They’re equal parts confidant to finance, talent scout for M&A, and translator-in-chief for leadership’s vision—often converting abstract ambition into coherent slides under tight deadlines. Far from being mere slide jockeys, these CSOs play a critical yet understated role: stitching together fragmented priorities into a cohesive direction, and doing so in organizations where clarity is often in short supply.
But strategy cannot rely on one person’s heroics in the C-suite—it must evolve into a shared organizational muscle, practiced consistently across levels and functions. Otherwise, strategic insight remains the domain of a few, rather than the engine of many.
Worse still, while CSOs are invcreasingly part of many C-suites, strategy as a competency is almost entirely absent. With a few exceptions, such as Shell’s Open University or the McKinsey Academy, which offer courses on strategy, there is no internal corporate equivalent to the U.S. Army's deliberate development of the strategy competency.[1] CSOs are often appointed without formal training, possibly completing an executive course at Harvard or Wharton, and frequently transitioning from line management, marketing, sales, or finance. While these backgrounds provide important perspectives, they seldom offer the systems thinking, strategic foresight, or complexity-handling necessary to truly define a company's long-term positioning.
Even more concerning, the executives CSOs report to (CEOs, COOs, and CFO) in many cases lack the strategic literacy to effectively collaborate with or amplify their CSO’s capabilities. Without shared fluency in strategic frameworks, ambiguity tolerance, or scenario-based decision-making, the CSO becomes a lone voice in the wilderness, capable of insight, but unable to activate change. Most companies still lack a structured pathway for developing strategic professionals: no doctrine, no discipline, no profession. This is not to say there aren’t great CSOs out there, only that they tend to be great in spite of the system, not because of it.
As a result, many organizations lack not only strategic leadership but strategic literacy at all levels. In a world demanding constant reinvention, this absence of a strategic core is more than a gap, it is an existential vulnerability.
Meanwhile, the threats mount:
Economic volatility is no longer a surprise; it’s the new background noise.
AI and automation are moving faster than most companies’ internal email chains, see my article Cost Asymmetry Wars.
Supply chains remain one shipping delay away from existential dread.
Regulation now comes at you like a swarm of bees with law degrees.
And yet, many firms respond by rearranging their org charts and hoping for a miracle.
On Strategy puts it bluntly:
"Tactical mistakes can be corrected. Strategic flops live forever."[4]
Blockbuster didn’t go down because it couldn’t send a DVD in the mail. It went down because it couldn’t imagine a future where that mattered less than streaming. Netflix could. That’s strategy.
AI: The Litmus Test for Strategic Maturity
Let’s talk about AI. No, not just ChatGPT writing press releases or clearing your inbox. We’re talking about tectonic shifts. AI is not a cherry on top—it’s a new layer of the cake. The advent of AI presents an inflection point that will test the efficacy of a corporation’s strategy competency.
In An AI Strategy is a Dangerous Distraction, I assert that AI changes not just how you do things, but what you should be doing in the first place.[5] AI, as a foundational technology, calls for a redesign of the Business Strategy and a critical examination of the existing business model.
Key questions strategic leaders must answer:
Where to play: Is AI moving your market boundaries while you’re still watching last quarter’s dashboards?
How to win: Can AI be your superpower for differentiating through speed, precision, or personalization?
What to stop doing: What parts of your business are about to be put out of their misery by a machine?
Strategic companies don’t just adopt AI. They rethink their value. They ask: If we built this company today, with these tools and insights, how would we compete? If your answer is "mostly the same," then you probably missed the point.
Strategists see patterns before others see problems and chart pathways where others see gridlock.
What Strategists Actually Do
Strategists are not vision-board artists or glorified spreadsheet ninjas. They are the connective tissue between where the organization is and where it must go to survive and thrive. They see patterns before others see problems and chart pathways where others see gridlock.
Mindset First, Always
Roger Martin outlines three essential mindsets that separate the truly strategic from the theatrically analytical.[3]
Customers First: Strategy begins and ends with deep empathy for the customer. If your strategy doesn’t make someone’s life better, you don’t have a strategy—you have an internal initiative.
Complexity Accepted: The world is a complex adaptive system. It’s not random, but it doesn’t follow your quarterly roadmap either. Great strategists see the patterns and pivot accordingly.
Future Makers: Strategy is not about optimizing the present. It’s about making a future that doesn’t yet exist—before your competitors do.
Competencies of a Great Strategist
Drawing from military doctrine (On Strategy: A Primer and U.S. Army FA-59 training), modern strategic education, and Martin's practitioner insights, here are the skills and behaviors that define world-class strategists:[3][4][6][7]
Critical Thinking: Relentlessly question assumptions and test ideas before they ossify into dogma.
Creative Thinking: Design unorthodox, asymmetric, or innovative approaches to persistent challenges.
Contextual Thinking: Read the room—and the market, and the geopolitical shifts—before others know there is a room.
Conceptual Thinking: Build mental models that explain the dynamics of change and why your industry won’t look the same in three years.
Strategic Empathy: Understand the worldview of customers, partners, and even competitors—without becoming blind to your own mission.
Tradeoff Optimization: Make the hard calls between short-term sugar highs and long-term structural wins.
Strategic Foresight: Anticipate the future without a crystal ball—just with better assumptions, sharper questions, and relentless curiosity.
Juggling Complexity: Keep seven variables in the air while balancing on the data tightrope—and somehow still land the pitch.
Communicative Thinking: Tell stories that turn strategy into a movement, not just a memo.
Collaborative Thinking: Co-create with the doers, not just the thinkers. A strategy built in isolation dies in isolation.
Influence and Persuasion: Shape how people think, decide, and act without formal authority.
Ethical Balancing: Drive outcomes that create value without compromising on values.
Roles and Deliverables of a Strategist
So what do strategists actually provide, beyond insights and exceptionally detailed whiteboard sketches?[6][7]
Define Problems: Frame challenges so well that solutions practically introduce themselves.
Enable Choices: Prioritize what matters. Say "no" often enough that the "yes" is powerful.
Link Actions to Effects: Craft causal chains between what you do and what you intend to achieve.
Navigate Complexity: Balance speed with depth, vision with feasibility, and innovation with integration.
Advise Leaders: Be the voice in the room that blends realism with boldness.
Develop Strategic Narratives: Build a compelling logic chain wrapped in a story people want to follow.
Plan Operations: Turn strategy into something that can walk and talk.
Validated Learning: Treat everything as an assumption until proven or disproven by facts.
Innovate: Spot opportunities before the market gets crowded. Create advantage through differentiation, not duplication.
Practical Skills in Action
Qualitative Appreciation: Understand the emotional, perceptual, and experiential side of customers, not just the numeric.[3]
Dialogue over Dictation: Great strategy is co-authored, not handed down from on high.
Multi-variable Juggling: Track, prioritize, and integrate multiple inputs without dropping the big ones.[3]
Mentorship and Learning: Seek and offer critique. Strategists aren’t born; they’re built, usually through fire and iteration.
Integrated, Not Isolated
A strategist doesn’t float above the fray. They work alongside the operators, understand the numbers, influence the culture, and connect ambition to execution.
And above all, they act. Strategy is not just smart talk. It’s making decisions that reshape the organization’s future.
This is where many leaders often stumble. A strategist isn’t a seer. They’re not your corporate oracle. They don’t forecast the future. They help build it.[3]
Think of them as your sharpest internal guide—someone who challenges assumptions, shapes smart bets, and ensures that your ambition doesn’t exceed your coherence.
Roger Martin says it best: "Strategy is a hypothesis. Test it, learn, adapt."[3]
In military parlance, this is the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. The strategist ensures the loop spins faster and smarter than the competition’s.[4]
They help you:
Spot patterns in noise.
Design smart experiments.
Interpret signals without bias.
Kill pet projects with discipline.
Reallocate capital based on foresight, not politics.
In short, they ensure you don’t just appear smart. They ensure you are smart—at exactly the moment it counts.[3][4][6][7]
Organizational Enablers
Building a robust corporate strategy competency and career path requires more than just structural intent—it demands thoughtful design, cultural buy-in, and operational integration. Just as the U.S. Army treats its Strategist Corps (FA-59) as a professional discipline, corporations must regard strategy not as a planning activity, but as a fundamental organizational capability. Below are the key enablers, now enhanced with best practices, research insights, and military parallels.
Grow Strategic Thinkers
Train CSOs, emerging strategists, and business line owners in foundational disciplines such as critical thinking, systems thinking, war-gaming, and strategic foresight. These competencies equip them to interpret complex environments, anticipate disruptions, and formulate adaptive responses. Consider it a strategy boot camp—without the push-ups. A great example of emerging startegists are Product Managers, managing individual product lines in the market.
Embed Strategy in Operations
Stop keeping strategy locked in the executive suite like it’s fine china. A real strategy needs to be evident every day—in product roadmaps, customer journeys, and quarterly planning. If your CSO can’t influence the business model, you don’t have a strategist. You have a spectator.
Foster Internal Commitment
Strategy dies in the theater of fake buy-in. Involve the people who make things happen from day one. Let them stress-test the big ideas. Strategy isn’t a script. It’s a collaboration.
Facilitate Strategic Learning
Use the OODA loop. Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. Then repeat. It's like agile, but for grown-ups. Strategy isn't "set it and forget it." It’s continuous, messy, and deeply human.
Ensure Strategy Is Executable
Great strategy without execution is like a Ferrari without gas. Strategists must understand what’s possible (technically, operationally, and politically). If they don’t know how the sausage is made, they shouldn’t be in charge of the menu.
Treat Strategy as a Core Capability
Make strategy part of your leadership DNA. Celebrate it. Reward it. Bake it into how promotions are earned. Because in a world that punishes confusion, clarity is currency.
Build a Career Path for Strategists
Treat your strategists like professionals, not placeholders. Build them a ladder:
Structured Training: Think scenario planning meets chess club meets business improv.
Clear Progression: From junior strategist to CSO—with stops along the way to learn, stumble, and lead.
Cross-Pollination: Rotate them through units, geographies, and crises.
Reward Impact: Strategy isn’t fluff. Pay for foresight. Incentivize alignment. Promote clarity.
Your future CSO might be a sharp analyst today. But without a path, they’ll either leave or stay average.
Conclusion: Strategy Is the Edge That Endures
In an age where complexity compounds faster than most organizations can comprehend it, and where yesterday’s playbook can’t even get you through tomorrow’s warm-up, strategy is not a luxury. It’s not a slide. It’s not a quarterly offsite. It’s a muscle. A discipline. A system.
The U.S. Army doesn’t build strategists for ceremony—it builds them to win today and tomorrow’s wars. Because in high-stakes environments, hoping for the best is malpractice. It needs professionals who can turn ambiguity into advantage and enable decisions that ripple all the way from the war room to the front line.
Your business may not be dodging drones or manuevering tanks. But in this economy, in this exponential era, your battlefield is just as unforgiving. The terrain changes weekly. Competitors emerge overnight. AI rewrites the rules before you’ve even read them.
You need strategy not as a buzzword, but as a practiced capability: embedded in leadership, fluent in operations, and built to adapt.
Because in a world defined by relentless change, only one thing wins: strategic coherence at speed.
And that starts not with another dashboard, but with real strategy.
Call to Action: Make Strategy a Profession, Not a PowerPoint
Hire one. A real strategist. Someone who questions, probes, and synthesizes. The Army Strategist Association is a good place to identify transitioning Army Strategists.
Train many. Strategy isn’t reserved for the top floor. Build it into your next generation of leaders, before they’re making million-dollar decisions in a fog of uncertainty.
Build the muscle. Make strategy a daily discipline, not an annual offsite. Organizations that treat it as core capability win, everyone else reacts until they can’t.
Ready to embed strategy where it belongs—in your leadership, your decisions, your DNA? Visit The Exponential Scout and contact me to start building your strategy competency.
Footnotes & References
U.S. Army Strategist Functional Area 59. Department of the Army Pamphlet 600–3, April 1, 2020. https://api.army.mil/e2/c/downloads/2023/02/28/1fd5abfc/fa-59-strategist-da-pam-600-3-as-of-1-apr-20.pdf
Mastering Chaos: Organizational Superpowers for the Exponential Age. (Citation assumed to be an internal or published framework as referenced.)
Roger L. Martin. Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, and "What Makes a Great Strategist" (2022). https://rogerlmartin.medium.com/what-makes-a-great-strategist-8fdfc3f9ad8c
On Strategy: A Primer, U.S. Army War College and Joint Advanced Warfighting School. https://publications.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/3694.pdf
Strategy and Artificial Intelligence Playbook. (Industry white paper citation; publisher may vary.)
"A Framework for Developing Military Strategists." Military Strategy Magazine. https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/A-Framework-for-Developing-Military-Strategists/
"What Should a Strategist Know and Do — and Why?" Military Strategy Magazine. https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/what-should-a-strategist-know-and-do-and-why/