Chronicles from a Caribbean Cubicle Podcast

Francis Wade
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There are significant challenges facing Caribbean companies. In the areas of strategic planning and productivity improvements, unique thinking is needed to break out of historical norms. But such thinking isn’t easy to find. Join me, Francis Wade, for some provocative insights into the way I see these problems. These are mostly audio editions of past Gleanr articles. longtermstrategy.substack.com

  1. May 5

    The Two Meetings That Turn Long-Term Strategy Into Motion

    Most top executives can generate urgency around a quarterly target. The mechanisms are familiar: dashboards, deadlines, compensation levers. People move. But ask those same executives to build genuine momentum toward a grand aspiration which needs a fifteen-year horizon, and something strange happens. They show up. They nod. They wait for the pressure to pass. This isn’t insubordination. It’s a rational response to a broken process. And if you’ve ever led a strategic planning cycle that produced a polished document nobody touched again, you already know the symptom. The question is whether you’ve correctly diagnosed the cause. The Real Problem Is Sequence, Not Ambition CEOs who struggle to activate major aspirations or breakthrough results typically frame it as a people problem — their teams aren’t bold enough, disciplined enough, or strategically literate enough. Frequently, they apply pressure to fix the problem and become too directive. They hope their personal energy fills the void. Perhaps just as often, they do the opposite and become too passive. In this mode they back off, hoping organic energy fills the void. It rarely does. Neither framing is quite right. In the end, CEO’s migrate towards short-term goals because they don’t have a reliable way to maintain both short-, mid-, and long-term momentum. The deeper issue is that most organizations try to do too much in a single planning meeting. Effective accomplishment of all three phases at the same time requires two distinct meetings, held weeks apart, each demanding a different posture from the leader. Getting the sequence right changes what the plan is, who owns it, and how fast it can move. Clarifying Misconceptions About Long Horizons Before the two meetings make sense, two widespread beliefs need to be addressed: the first is that long-range planning is inherently vague, and therefore not worth taking seriously. Mistake 1) This is a problem for CEOs who truly have big aspirations, because long-range planning calls for the decades needed to make breakthrough goals realistic and credible to stakeholders. Without adequate time, executives play the game mentioned before. They show up, nod, and wait for the pressure to disappear. This view of long-range planning being vague is understandable but technically wrong. The planning tools appropriate for year one of a strategy are genuinely different from those suited to year twenty-five — but that doesn’t mean the far end of the horizon is a guess. It just needs to be equipped in the right way. For example, the Rolling Wave Technique leads to the use of different methods, mindsets and discussions for short- and long-term phases. It provides operational details in the short term, and higher-altitude targets and milestones in the long term. Neither end is more rigorous than the other. They are rigorous in different ways. The confusion exists because precious few use the technique. It’s just not taught in most business schools as a component of corporate strategy. Mistake 2) The second faulty belief is that long-term aspirations don’t matter. To explain why this is so wrong, consider a historical example. Medieval cathedral builders routinely committed to projects spanning two to three centuries. No individual craftsman who broke ground would see the finished nave. Yet construction continued across generations, through plagues and political upheaval, because the aspiration was large enough to give the work meaning — and specific enough to give it credible direction. Floor plans existed. Proportions were specified. Progress was measurable even when the endpoint was a lifetime away. This points to a counterintuitive truth: the grander the ambition, the more likely it is to unlock discretionary effort — the creativity and energy people typically reserve for pursuits they actually care about. Modest, short-term goals produce compliance. In corporate life, these tend to be overwhelmingly financial. Transformative goals, properly constructed, produce ownership. The audacity of a well-chosen endpoint is itself a management tool, one that most corporations never pick up. With these misconceptions cleared up, here are the details of both meetings and how they are conducted. Meeting One: The CEO Goes Quiet The first meeting has one non-negotiable design principle: the CEO sponsors but does not lead. Or facilitate. This is harder than it sounds. Most executives who have reached the top of an organization have done so partly through the force of their vision. They arrive at planning sessions having already formed views about where the company should go. The instinct is to share those views early — to inspire the team with a compelling picture of the future and let the session fill in the details. Resist it. Completely. The goals of this first meeting are for the executive team to construct the long-range aspiration themselves and define the means to accomplish it. That means choosing a target year — somewhere between fifteen and thirty years out — and then building the assumptions, scenarios, and numbers required to define what success looks like at that point. It’s followed by the use of the Rolling Wave Technique to lay out a plan for the entire horizon, with more details in closer than later years. Facilitators can guide the process. The CEO’s role is to hold the space while that process unfolds, tolerating the discomfort of an outcome they did not pre-select and cannot entirely predict. What makes this worthwhile is what it produces: genuine co-ownership. Every figure the team debated, they will later defend. Every scenario they stress-tested, they trust because they built it. A strategic target and plan defined by the CEO and handed to the team is a document. A strategy the team constructed is a commitment — and the difference shows up in execution, not in the planning room. For example, one team member assumes a technology shift in five years. Another assumes fifteen. Both assumptions are driving their instincts about investment and timing, silently, in every meeting they attend. Naming those beliefs, debating them, and converting them into dated claims is one of the most underrated outputs of a well-run long-range planning session. It also reveals where the team’s consensus is genuine and where it is merely polite. Meeting Two: The CEO Becomes an Instigator Several weeks after the first meeting — long enough for the plan to feel real, not so long that momentum fades — the CEO calls a second session. It has a single agenda item, framed as a question: “Using the same logic we built together, how much faster could we realistically get there?” The phrasing matters more than it might appear. This is not a demand for “twice the output in half the time” — the kind of arbitrary stretch target that produces creative accounting and quiet cynicism. It is an invitation to apply the team’s own reasoning to a compression problem. They set the destination and the pathway. Now they are being asked whether the chosen route is as efficient as it could be. And because the team built the original logic, they are the only people positioned to answer the question credibly. They know which assumptions were conservative. They know where interdependencies between units create natural leverage — and where they create drag. They know which technologies on the industry’s horizon could compress a transition the plan assumed would take a decade. They know where the plan padded timelines because of organizational inertia rather than genuine constraint. That collective intelligence almost never gets activated, because the question that unlocks it is almost never asked. Unfortunately, leaders tend to apply pressure before the team has built the logic, which means compression becomes a negotiation rather than an analysis. The two-meeting sequence reverses that order — and the difference in what the team produces is striking. The best version of this second meeting doesn’t only produce a revised plan. It produces a set of credible acceleration options: specific conditions under which the timeline compresses, specific investments or decisions that could trigger those conditions, and an honest accounting of what would have to be true for the faster scenario to hold. The team leaves not just aligned, but strategically fluent in a way that one-off retreats almost never achieve. Case in point: Before 2017, one of my clients in the Jamaican financial sector had never put a date to an assumption: “the average local customer is not ready for online services.” When I challenged them to place a date on the moment when 50% of the population would reach that threshold, they predicted: 2028. They wove that date into their plan. Three years later when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, that plan was simply accelerated (i.e. compressed) to be implemented within months rather than a decade. They were lucky. The Resilience Dividend There is a benefit to this process that rarely appears in planning frameworks: the organization becomes significantly harder to surprise. An executive team that has jointly built a long-range plan, surfaced its embedded assumptions, dated them, stress-tested scenarios, and explored acceleration options has essentially pre-thought a wide range of futures. When the external environment forces their hand — a market disruption, a technology shift, a crisis that compresses years into months — they are not improvising. They are activating a version of something they already worked through. The decisions feel fast because they had already built the internal logic needed to respond. This is not a theoretical benefit. Organizations routinely discover, under pressure, that their plans contained a faster path they simply hadn’t chosen to pursue yet. The companies best positioned to accelerate in a crisis are the ones that already knew, in principle, how acceleration wa

    18 min

  2. Apr 30

    Blue Ocean Strategy Has a Flaw Nobody Talks About

    There is a book on the shelf of almost every serious executive in the world. It has sold over four million copies, been translated into 46 languages, and spawned an entire consulting industry. Its central idea is so compelling that once you hear it, you cannot unhear it. The book is Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS), published in 2004 by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. The central idea: stop fighting competitors for the same shrinking pool of customers. Create new market space where competition is irrelevant. Stop swimming in a Red Ocean of blood and churn. Find your Blue Ocean. Every executive who has heard this wants it. The aspiration is sound. The problem is that the book quietly fails to deliver what its title promises - and that failure has cost organizations time in over two decades of strategy retreats. The Word That Did the Damage The most consequential editorial decision in modern management publishing happened when the authors agreed to put the word “Strategy” in the title. That single word changed how executives read the book. Strategy implies a plan. A method. A set of steps you can follow to get from where you are to where you want to be. Executives arrived at the book expecting operational guidance. What they received instead was one of the most elegant collections of business case studies ever assembled — and no instructions for replication. Consider the cases. Cirque du Soleil, the book’s showcase story, reinvented the circus by eliminating animals and creating a sophisticated adult entertainment category. Yellow Tail wine made wine approachable for beer drinkers by stripping out complexity and jargon. NVIDIA opened its graphics processors to general computing and created an entirely new category of accelerated processing. Taylor Swift reinvented the artist’s relationship to fans, catalog ownership, and brand extension. Each case is vivid. Each pattern is compelling. But each story was crafted long after the journey was complete. That is the problem. Every case in the book is retrospective. The authors identified companies that had already succeeded, mapped their moves, and presented the pattern. What they did not — and perhaps could not — provide is a repeatable method for how your company executes a similar move from scratch, in your industry, with your constraints, before the outcome is known. This is not a minor gap. It is the structural flaw that separates the book’s promise from its delivery. And it helps explain why boardrooms around the world have produced beautiful strategy canvases (as the book instructs) and returned to fighting the same competitive battles the following Monday morning. The Tool That Starts in the Wrong Place There is a deeper problem, and it lives inside the book’s primary diagnostic instrument — the Eliminate, Reduce, Raise, Create grid, known as the ERRC. To use the ERRC grid, you map what your industry currently does across every competitive factor, then decide what to eliminate, reduce, raise, and create. Every factor you analyze is defined in relation to what competitors already do. The entire diagnostic starts with your rivals. Here is the irony: a framework designed to help you escape competition requires you to think about competition first. If your strategic imagination is anchored to what already exists, you have not left the Red Ocean. You have only rearranged your position within it. The book’s primary tool quietly undermines its central promise. The Pattern the Book Ignores Set aside the tool problem for a moment. Assume your team finds its Blue Ocean. You create uncontested market space, grow rapidly, and establish genuine differentiation. What happens next? Blue Ocean Strategy is largely silent on this question. And the answer, drawn from its own case studies, is uncomfortable. Cirque du Soleil created its blue ocean in the 1980s and spent nearly four decades defending it. New competitors entered experiential entertainment. Costs rose. The company took on debt to fund global expansion. In June 2020, it filed for bankruptcy protection. Netflix invented streaming video and watched Disney, Amazon, Apple, and dozens of others flood the same space within a decade. Uber redefined urban transportation and has spent most of its existence losing money as imitators replicated its model in every major market. These are not execution failures. They are the inevitable result of treating a blue ocean as a destination rather than a phase. Every competitive advantage has an expiry date. The timeline varies — years, sometimes decades — but the sequence never changes. You create uncontested space. Competitors notice. Imitators arrive. Margins compress. The blue ocean turns red. This is not misfortune. It is the entirely predictable lifecycle of any strategic advantage, and it has been predictable for a long time. That is the core of what Blue Ocean Strategy leaves out: a theory of time. The book is written as though the strategic challenge is finding the right space. It is not. The deeper challenge is understanding that every space you find is already aging from the moment you enter it — and that long-term survival depends on building the next blue ocean while the current one is still profitable enough to fund it. A framework called the Three Horizons Framework, developed by Hodgson, Curry and others, addresses precisely this gap. It argues that organizations must simultaneously protect today’s advantage, develop tomorrow’s opportunity, and explore the possibilities that will matter in five to ten years. Not sequentially. Simultaneously. Because by the time your current advantage is visibly declining, it is already too late to begin building its replacement. Blue Ocean Strategy asks: where should we compete? The Three Horizons Framework asks: for how long, and what comes next? The first question without the second is not a strategy. It is a plan with no second act — which is exactly what Cirque du Soleil, Netflix, and Uber each discovered in turn. The Company That Proved Both Points Wawa is a food retailer based in the northeastern United States. It operates convenience stores, fuel stations, and quick-service restaurants — three of the lowest-margin, highest-failure-rate business categories in existence. It is also, by most available measures, one of the most successful blue ocean practitioners in American business history. In 2009, facing a world where supermarkets, fast casual chains, and fuel retailers were all converging on its territory, Wawa’s leadership formally applied the Blue Ocean tools. The strategy canvas and ERRC grid structured their analysis and were genuinely useful. They identified that their weakest offering — food service — was also their highest-potential opportunity for differentiation. What followed was systematic reinvention. Wawa repositioned from a convenience store that also sold food into a quality quick-service restaurant that also sold fuel and convenience items. Fresh bread baked on premises. Customizable meals made to order. High-quality coffee at accessible prices. Touchscreen ordering kiosks. A store layout redesigned with food at the center. The results are measurable. An average 7-Eleven generates roughly US$30,000 to $35,000 in weekly revenue per store. Wawa averages US$116,000. That gap — more than three times the category standard — is what genuine blue ocean execution produces in real dollars. Perhaps more telling is what the broader industry makes of Wawa’s performance. QSR 50, the standard industry ranking of quick-service restaurants, does not include Wawa in its listings. The reason given is that Wawa sells fuel and packaged goods, which technically classifies it as a convenience store rather than a restaurant. If Wawa were included, it would rank first in per-store sales — ahead of McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, and Panera Bread. The most effective blue ocean practitioner in American retail is invisible to the industry supposed to be tracking it. That is what genuine category creation actually looks like. But here is the detail that the book’s framework cannot account for, delivered in the words of Wawa’s own former CEO Howard Stoeckel: “We’re paranoid when it comes to success and we’re always reinventing ourselves.” Not proud. Not secure. Paranoid. Wawa has reinvented itself across more than two centuries — from dairy farming to grocery retail to convenience stores to fuel to quick-service restaurants. Each reinvention happened before the previous model was exhausted. In 2012, Stoeckel announced that Wawa was no longer a convenience store. It was, he declared, “a leading quick-service restaurant and leader in the fast-casual-to-go space that also sells gas and convenience items.” No such category existed at scale at the time. Competitors scoffed. Customers gradually came to see it exactly that way. That move — naming a new space and teaching the market to recognize it before rivals could claim it — is not in the Blue Ocean book. It belongs to a separate body of thinking about category design, developed by writers including Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Nicolas Cole. Their argument is direct: whoever names the new category can dominate it for decades to come. Language is key. The market does not automatically recognize new value — someone has to hand it the vocabulary. What Executives Should Actually Do Blue Ocean Strategy offers the right aspiration. The ambition to escape a competitive space rather than simply fight better within it is correct, and the book makes that case more compellingly than almost anything else in the management canon. But aspiration without method produces what most organizations have experienced: a retreat, a strategy canvas, a renewed sense of possibility, and no change the following quarter. The complete system looks something like this. Use BOS to identify where genuine value innovation is possible — where you can cre

    16 min

  3. Apr 6

    The Moment I Realised My Story Library Was Embarrassingly Small

    There is a specific kind of professional humiliation that doesn’t arrive with a bang. It sneaks in quietly, while you’re nodding, performing competence, convinced the conversation is going well. Mine arrived fifty minutes into a live podcast recording with Seth Godin. I was mid-interview. The mic was hot. And somewhere between his twelfth and thirteenth story, I heard myself say — out loud, on the record — “I don’t know how that magic works, because I don’t have anywhere near as many stories.” Not to a colleague afterward. Not in a private debrief. To Seth. Live. While we were still recording. That sentence has followed me since. What I Watched Happen in One Hour In sixty minutes, Seth Godin moved through fourteen distinct stories. Not anecdotes he was winging. Not tangents. Fourteen purposeful, precisely deployed narratives — each one doing specific work, each one landing cleanly and then stepping aside. A hospital crib factory in Buffalo. A Walmart auditorium in Arkansas. A Google homepage with two links. A grease-covered piece of equipment that nobody had touched in a decade. Every single one hit. Every single one served a function. And I sat there with my small, carefully curated collection of retreat-tested stories — organised around a single argument about time horizons — and realised I had been confusing a handful of tools with an actual toolkit. That’s not a library. That’s a filing cabinet with three folders. The Research I Did After The interview shook me enough to investigate. What exactly was Seth doing, and how consistently was he doing it? With AI assistance, I pulled and analysed twelve recent Seth Godin interviews. Across all of them, he averaged 11.08 stories per conversation — 133 stories in total. His most recent book, This is Strategy, contains 87 stories. So I asked him directly: “Is your list of stories infinite?” His answer was more useful than I expected. “No,” he said. “And the best consultants carry around twenty stories.” Twenty. Not two hundred. Not a bottomless archive. Twenty stories — known intimately, deployable on demand, calibrated for different rooms and different audiences. He compared it to master magicians: the great ones haven’t perfected a hundred tricks. They’ve mastered around a dozen, and they know exactly when to use each one. Twenty stories. That’s the target. And most of us — including me, before that interview — couldn’t name five that we genuinely owned. What Gladwell Does That Most Strategists Don’t Malcolm Gladwell — bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Outliers, and Blink — operates on a similar principle, and his method is almost shamelessly transparent once you see it. He never opens with a thesis. Never. There is always a human scene first. A hockey player’s birth month. A recipe for ketchup. A single moment of lived experience that drops you into a specific world before you’ve had time to raise your defenses. Only once your attention is captured does he pull back to reveal the larger pattern. And then — this is the part most people miss — he withholds the ending deliberately. He tells ninety percent of the story, pauses to layer in research, context, and argument, and only then closes the loop. By the time he delivers the conclusion, you’ve been waiting for it. You feel the release. None of that is improvised. It is a deliberate system, engineered to do one specific thing: name what the audience already senses, but cannot articulate. Seth described this in our conversation with a fundraising example. A skilled fundraiser, he said, doesn’t open with statistics about hunger. They open with a question: “What was it like at your dinner table growing up?” The data comes later. The story opens the door. Both men are doing the same thing: uncovering the story that gives language to something the audience already intuitively knows. Seth calls this “profound” — not the delivery of new information, but the gift of precision to an existing intuition. That is a fundamentally different job than most executives think storytelling does. The Real Problem With How Strategists Use Stories Most executives use stories as decoration. They drop one in to break up a dense presentation, to humanise a slide, to get a laugh after a difficult section. That’s not what Godin and Gladwell are doing. Their stories aren’t decoration. They’re load-bearing. Remove them and the entire argument collapses. The distinction matters enormously in strategy work. When you’re trying to shift how an organisation thinks about time, risk, or change — data alone does not move people. People need a narrative frame before they can absorb an argument. Stories aren’t the soft packaging around the hard thinking. They are the thinking, made transmissible. Which means the question isn’t whether you have stories. Everyone has stories. The question is whether you have the right ones — ones that will actually land with your specific audience, in your specific context, under pressure. Right now, most senior professionals cannot answer that question with any confidence. Building the Library Here is the uncomfortable truth: the gap Seth exposed cannot be closed by reading more books, attending more conferences, or taking another course. It requires a different kind of discipline — one that is specific, deliberate, and ongoing. Start with genuine curiosity. Not with what you think you should know, but with what actually pulls your attention. The stories that stick with you across months and years are telling you something about what you uniquely see that others miss. That’s the foundation. Then do the work: find stories worth keeping, stress-test whether they will land with your audiences, organise them so they are retrievable under pressure — not just vaguely remembered — and practise the telling until it no longer feels like performance. The raw material is everywhere. Platforms built for deliberate curation of strategic content exist precisely for this purpose. Decades of interviews, documentaries, case studies, and executive conversations are available to anyone willing to approach them with intention rather than passive consumption. The constraint isn’t access. The constraint is discipline. Seth’s number is twenty. Yours might be fewer. But you need to know which stories they are — you need to own them, not just have encountered them — and most of us, if we’re honest, are nowhere close. The Sentence That Changed My Practice I didn’t plan to be candid on that podcast. The confession about my own story gap wasn’t scripted vulnerability. It was the involuntary, real-time recognition of a professional blind spot I had been carrying for years without knowing it. That’s how these things tend to arrive. Not in a structured self-assessment. Not in a performance review. In the middle of a live conversation with someone who has simply done the work you haven’t. The question isn’t whether you’re a good strategist. You may well be exceptional at frameworks, diagnosis, and execution planning. The question is whether your stories can do what Seth Godin’s stories do — open a door, name what your audience already senses, and make your argument not just understandable but felt. If you’re not sure, that uncertainty is your answer. Start building the library. P.S. — The Curation Problem Has a Starting Point If the article resonated, part of your next step is finding the right raw material — stories worth adding to your library, told by people who actually know how to tell them. That’s exactly what StratCinema was built for. It’s a curated video platform for strategy professionals — not an algorithm feeding you whatever keeps you scrolling, but a deliberately assembled collection of interviews, case studies, and executive conversations selected because they carry genuine strategic weight. Think of it as the opposite of YouTube’s recommendation engine. If you’re serious about building your story library with intention, it’s a useful place to start: StratCinema.org P.P.S. — Five Prompts to Go Deeper (Use These With Any LLM) The ideas in this article are a door. These prompts help you walk through it. 1. Audit Your Current Story Library “I’m a [role] working with [type of clients/organisations]. I want to identify the strategic stories I currently rely on. Help me audit them by asking me questions one at a time — what the story is, what argument it supports, and whether it would land with different audience types.” 2. Reverse-Engineer a Master Storyteller “Analyse how Seth Godin uses stories in his writing and speaking. What structural patterns does he use consistently? Give me five specific techniques I can practise, with an example of each.” 3. Find Stories Hidden in Your Own Experience “I’m going to describe three professional situations I’ve been in. For each one, help me identify whether there’s a story worth keeping — one that names something an audience already senses but can’t articulate. Ask me to describe the first situation.” 4. Build a Story for a Specific Strategic Argument “I need to make the argument that [insert your strategic point] to an audience of [insert audience]. Don’t give me data or frameworks. Help me find or construct a story that opens a door to this idea — something human and specific that lands before I introduce the argument.” 5. Design Your Personal Twenty-Story Repertoire “Seth Godin says the best consultants carry around twenty stories. Help me design mine. Based on my work in [field/industry], what categories of stories should I have in my library? Give me a framework for organising them by purpose — not by topic — so I can retrieve the right one under pressure.” These work best when you treat the LLM as a thinking partner rather than a search engine. Push back on its answers. Ask it to go deeper. The

    11 min

  4. Mar 18

    Your Mission-Driven Organization Deserves Better Strategy Tools

    Picture a familiar scene in a non-profit organization. A hotel conference room. Flip charts on easels. A two-day offsite that everyone has blocked out on their calendar and quietly dreaded. The exercises begin. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Stakeholder maps. Priority matrices. The team engages dutifully, filling in the boxes, generating the language that planning retreats are supposed to generate. Then comes the afternoon slump - and it is not just fatigue from the morning’s work. Something more specific has happened. The conversation has drifted away from the reason the organisation exists. Words like “competitive positioning” and “market capture” are appearing on the sticky notes, and they feel borrowed - like wearing a suit that belongs to someone else. Nobody says anything. Everyone is willing the process to work. A document emerges by the final session. The board receives it at the next meeting. And within a few months, it occupies a shelf or a folder, largely untouched. This is not a story about poor facilitation or disengaged leadership. It is a story about using the wrong instrument for the job. Where These Frameworks Actually Come From Management strategy as a discipline has a particular genealogy. The models that dominate executive education - the competitive analyses, the positioning matrices, the market share battles - were developed with a specific type of organisation in mind: businesses that survive or collapse based on their ability to outperform rivals and make profits. The evidence is in the curriculum. Academic research suggests that the vast majority of MBA case material is drawn from industries where competition is the central organising tension. The mental model underneath most strategy training treats the world as a contest. There is a prize. There are opponents. The goal is to win more than you lose. That framing is genuinely useful for firms operating in those conditions. The urgency of a competitor threatening your revenue is real, and tools designed around that urgency have genuine motivating power. But take those same tools into a cooperative, a trade association, a government agency, or a development organisation, and something goes wrong almost immediately. (The same applies to a monopoly.) The animating force - the rival who might take what is yours - does not exist in the same way. Frameworks engineered around that force become awkward, like running software on a system it was never designed for. The afternoon energy drop at your retreat was not a morale problem. It was the sound of a square peg meeting a round hole. The Timeframe Problem Nobody Talks About The mismatch runs deeper than vocabulary, though. Competitive strategy is built around a particular relationship with time - specifically, a short one. The frameworks that dominate business education are oriented toward near-term results: quarterly performance, annual targets, the speed of response to a market threat. Mission-driven organisations often operate under an entirely different time logic. A land trust working to preserve ecosystems, a credit union serving underbanked communities, a health institution building public capacity - these organisations are answerable to timescales that most competitive strategy tools cannot even see. When a long-horizon organisation runs its strategy through a short-horizon framework, something gets quietly distorted. The institution begins optimising for the measurable and the near-term, while the foundational commitments - the ones that justify the organisation’s existence - drift into the background. The Co-operative Group in the United Kingdom offers a sobering case study. Once among the most significant member-owned enterprises in the world, the Co-op entered the 2010s in serious trouble. An investigation into its near-collapse revealed a decade of decisions shaped by competitive growth logic: major retail acquisitions, banking mergers, rapid diversification across sectors. The goal had been scale - more market presence, more revenue streams, more assets. What the organisation had not been tracking with the same rigour was whether any of this expansion was coherent with what a cooperative is actually for. Its governance was member-based. Its legitimacy came from community trust. Its identity was inseparable from a set of values about how business ought to be conducted. By the time a £1.5 billion hole appeared in the banking arm, the institution had been operating with someone else’s strategy for years. The tools it had borrowed rewarded growth metrics. They had no mechanism for asking whether growth was serving the mission - or consuming it. The same drift appears in organisations across every sector. * A humanitarian agency that chases high-visibility donor projects at the expense of quiet, unglamorous long-term work. * A professional body that adds revenue streams until its membership can no longer articulate what the body stands for. * A regional development authority that reports on outputs while the underlying social fabric it was created to strengthen continues to fray. In each case, the damage is slow and largely invisible inside the planning documents that caused it. Planning Built Around Purpose What these organisations need is not a modified version of competitive planning. They need a process that begins with a different assumption — that strategy is about protecting and advancing a purpose across time, not about positioning against opponents. * Such a process starts with an honest reckoning with the present. Before any direction is set, the organisation needs to understand where it actually stands - not just financially, but in terms of mission integrity. How is trust held among the people the organisation serves? When has the institution historically drifted from its purpose, and what triggered those moments? What resources - financial, relational, reputational - are genuinely available? * From that foundation, a long horizon is established. Somewhere between fifteen and thirty years is typically productive. This might feel uncomfortably distant, but the distance is the point. It shifts the planning conversation away from quarterly anxieties and toward the questions that actually define an institution’s legacy. * With a target horizon in place, the team explores a range of possible futures rather than committing to a single premature forecast. The world in twenty-five years will be shaped by forces that cannot be predicted with precision - demographic shifts, technological change, political reconfigurations, ecological pressures. Scenario thinking does not pretend otherwise. It builds the capacity to navigate uncertainty rather than deny it, and it asks the organisation to identify which kind of future best allows its mission to flourish. * From a single chosen scenario, the planning process works backwards. If the organisation needs to be in a certain condition twenty-five years from now, what does the ten-year mark look like? The five-year mark? What must be in place, and by when? What are the big tradeoffs which need to be made? This backward mapping turns an inspiring long-term vision into a logical chain of necessary steps, each grounded in the one that follows it. * Only after that work is complete does it make sense to design a short-term action plan - because now there is a genuine strategic context for it. Immediate decisions are no longer just reactive. They serve something larger. Here, further tradeoffs must be made. The Question Underneath the Question The mechanics matter, but the conceptual shift matters more. Competitive strategy is structured around the question: How do we beat them? Purpose-driven strategy is structured around a different one: How do we remain who we are, and do what we exist to do, across the years ahead? These produce very different conversations - different discussions at leadership retreats, different criteria for investment decisions, different definitions of success that get embedded in the culture over time. Cooperatives, civil society organisations, public institutions, and social enterprises are not inferior versions of private companies. They are different kinds of institutions altogether, built on different social contracts, accountable to different stakeholders, and serving purposes that exist precisely because markets and competitive logic have limits. The strategy process these organisations use should reflect that - not apologise for it. When the next retreat in your non-profit ends with a document that finally stays off the shelf, it will be because the planning process started from the right place: not how do we win, but how do we endure, and why does it matter that we do. ————————————— P.S. Here are some LLM prompts you can use for further investigation. Go Deeper: Five Prompts for Further Exploration The argument in this article points to a gap — between the strategy tools most executives have been given and the organisations they are actually leading. The five prompts below are designed for use with any AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or similar). Each one picks up where the article leaves off. Copy, paste, and adapt the parts in brackets to your own context. Prompt 1: Diagnose Your Own Organisation For the reader who finished the article thinking — “this is us.” I lead a [cooperative / government agency / NGO / family business / religious institution / statutory body] in [country/region]. Based on the argument that most strategy frameworks were designed for competitive, profit-first organisations, help me diagnose whether my organisation has been using the wrong strategy tools. Ask me five diagnostic questions — one at a time, waiting for my answer before moving to the next — that will reveal whether our strategy process is genuinely built around our mission and long time horizon, or whether we have been borrowing competitive f

    12 min

  5. Feb 24

    When Excellence Breeds Failure: Why Your Best Team Might Be Building Your Worst Disaster

    Picture this: A talented leadership team. Top-tier credentials. Flawless execution. Every metric trending green. And yet, five years later, the company is fighting for survival—or worse, gone entirely. This isn’t a story about incompetence. It’s something far more insidious. It’s about intelligent people trapped inside a system that rewards them for making precisely the wrong choices. The Athletic Metaphor That Explains Everything Want to see this pattern in pure form? Look at how different sports organizations develop talent. Jamaica’s MVP Track Club has produced Olympic champions and world record holders whose careers span decades. Athletes like Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Elaine Thompson-Herah didn’t just win races—they sustained excellence well into their thirties, their bodies intact, their bank accounts healthy. Meanwhile, the American collegiate athletics system—the NCAA—operates like a different species entirely. Talented high schoolers arrive with Olympic potential. Four years later, many flame out, never to compete internationally again. Bodies broken. Dreams abandoned. Here’s what makes this fascinating: NCAA coaches aren’t incompetent. These are world-class professionals running billion-dollar programs with access to cutting-edge sports science. They track everything—times, splits, recovery metrics, nutrition, biomechanics. Yet they’ve built a machine designed to extract maximum performance over four years, regardless of what happens afterward. The system optimizes perfectly—for conference championships, television contracts, recruitment rankings. And in the process, it systematically destroys the very athletes who make those outcomes possible. MVP asked a different question entirely: What does success look like measured over a fifteen-year career instead of a four-year scholarship? The answer required sacrificing immediate gratification—forgoing certain meets, accepting slower progression, resisting the pressure to peak too early. The NCAA doesn’t fail because its people are stupid. It fails because every incentive, every measurement, every reward structure points them toward short-term glory and long-term destruction. And every dashboard they monitor confirms they’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to do—right up until the athlete graduates broken. Now here’s the uncomfortable question: Is your company running the NCAA playbook? The Corporate Version of Athletic Destruction Corporate history is littered with smart people making decisions that looked brilliant on every spreadsheet while quietly demolishing the foundation beneath them. Consider the financial sector meltdowns of recent decades. Before the 2008 crisis, before Enron, before the savings and loan disasters of the 1980s, things looked spectacular. Quarterly earnings beat expectations. Risk models showed green lights. Executives earned accolades for innovative financial engineering. The long-term destruction was being created from day one. Not by people too stupid to see it, but by systems designed never to look for it. Why Intelligence Doesn’t Protect You The trap works like this: The CEO who sacrifices this quarter’s numbers to protect next decade’s foundation doesn’t get applauded at the board meeting. They get questioned. Their judgment gets doubted. Their compensation takes a hit. Meanwhile, the executive who delivers short-term wins—even by mortgaging the future—gets promoted, celebrated, interviewed by business publications. This isn’t a failure of intelligence, discipline, or execution. It’s a design flaw in how success gets measured. The answer isn’t working harder within the existing framework. It’s redesigning the framework itself. That requires confronting existential questions about what you’re actually optimizing for—and having the courage to challenge metrics that everyone agrees are “obviously” correct. Three Techniques to Surface Hidden Disasters Here are practical methods to force your leadership team to see beyond the quarterly mirage: * The Pre-Mortem Exercise Gather your strategy team. Give them one instruction: Assume your current initiative has failed catastrophically fifteen years from now. Write the detailed story of exactly how and why. Not vague organizational hand-wringing like “we didn’t execute well enough.” A specific, uncomfortable narrative that traces the chain of consequences from today’s confident decision to tomorrow’s wreckage. The discipline is in the specificity. “We lost market share” is useless. “We optimized our pricing algorithm for immediate margin expansion, which slowly trained our best customers to view us as a commodity, which eroded pricing power, which forced us into a desperate discount spiral that destroyed brand equity and made us vulnerable to a well-funded competitor who simply waited us out” is useful. * The Second-Order Impact Map Most strategy discussions evaluate immediate effects and stop there. “This restructuring reduces overhead by 18%.” Applause. Meeting adjourned. The second-order map refuses to stop. It forces the room to keep pulling the thread: That cost reduction eliminates redundancy. Which reduces organizational resilience. Which means the next market shock hits harder. Which forces emergency measures. Which creates exactly the kind of chaos that drives your best people to competitors. Who use them to build what you should have built. Keep pulling until the consequences become uncomfortable enough to reconsider the decision. * The Twenty-Years-Later Role Play Identify the youngest person in your leadership team. They become a time traveler. It’s twenty years in the future. A new generation of leaders asks them: “What was it like in that 2026 strategy session? What did your team decide?” They respond with two scenarios. First, the courage scenario: “We confronted the hardest questions. We acknowledged uncomfortable truths. We made decisions that hurt short-term but protected long-term. Here’s how it played out.” Second, the cowardice scenario: “We pretended things we knew weren’t true. We optimized for looking good rather than being good. We told ourselves comfortable lies. Here’s the price we paid.” The technique works because it makes abstract future consequences feel visceral and immediate. The Choice That Defines Leadership Every organization faces the same fundamental question: Are you building an MVP or running an NCAA program? Are you optimizing for sustainable excellence or spectacular quarterly performance? Are you protecting the foundation or mining it for short-term gains? The smartest people in the room will keep making the worst decisions until the room itself gets redesigned. Until the metrics change. Until the incentives shift. Until the questions being asked force long-term consequences into immediate view. The techniques exist. The choice is whether you have the courage to use them. P.S. Five Prompts for Deeper Reflection Use these with your preferred AI to explore how these patterns might be operating in your specific context: * “I’m a [your role] at a [your industry] company. We’re currently optimizing for [your key metric]. Help me identify what long-term value we might be destroying in the process. Be brutally specific about the chain of consequences I’m not seeing.” * “Run a pre-mortem analysis: It’s 2040, and the strategy we implemented in 2025 has failed catastrophically. Write the detailed story of how our decision to [your current initiative] led to our downfall. Don’t hold back on uncomfortable specifics.” * “I need a second-order impact map. Our first-order effect from [your decision] is [immediate outcome]. Help me trace at least five levels deeper into the consequences, particularly the ones that would take years to surface but would be devastating when they do.” * “Create a dialogue between my 2025 self and my 2045 self. The older version has lived through the consequences of [current strategic choice]. What would they tell me that I’m not willing to hear right now?” * “Analyze my industry through the NCAA vs MVP lens. Who in my competitive landscape is running the short-term optimization playbook? Who’s building for decades? What specific metrics distinguish them? What would it cost me to switch approaches?” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe

    11 min

  6. Feb 16

    The Strategy Handoff Crisis: Why Your Successor Can’t Think Like You Do

    Companies obsess over documenting financial controls. They create detailed procedure manuals for operations. Yet when it comes to transferring strategic thinking between executives, most organizations fail spectacularly. The problem isn’t a lack of documentation. It’s documenting the wrong things entirely. The Six-Month Struggle Every Incoming Executive Faces Here’s a scenario playing out in boardrooms worldwide: A seasoned executive departs. Their replacement inherits comprehensive transition materials—market analyses, strategic frameworks, financial models, implementation roadmaps, organizational diagrams, and risk assessments. The incoming leader dedicates weeks to reviewing everything. They schedule meetings with key stakeholders. They take copious notes. They ask intelligent questions. Six months later, they’re still struggling to make strategic calls with the confidence their predecessor demonstrated. They hesitate where the former leader acted decisively. They miss contextual nuances that seem obvious in hindsight. What went wrong? Nothing and everything. The documentation was thorough. The transition process followed best practices. But the handoff materials contained polished conclusions instead of strategic thinking itself. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding about how strategic capability actually transfers between leaders. What Your Transition Documents Are Actually Missing Those transition binders look impressive. They contain everything a rational person would consider important: competitive threat assessments organized by market segment, positioning frameworks with detailed differentiation matrices, three-scenario financial projections, milestone-dependent implementation schedules, and comprehensive risk mitigation plans. The critical gap? None of these materials explain how the organization arrived at its current strategic direction. The genesis moment goes undocumented. Was the strategic pivot triggered by nearly losing a major client? Did a competitor’s unexpected move force a rethink? Did a board member ask an uncomfortable question that wouldn’t go away? The discovery process remains invisible. What initial research contradicted long-held assumptions? Which sacred cows got sacrificed? When did the leadership team realize their comfortable worldview was dangerously wrong? The human drama gets erased. That intense multi-day retreat where Finance and Operations clashed over resource priorities? Forgotten. The skeptical VP who opposed the initiative before becoming its most passionate advocate? Airbrushed out. The moment someone finally said what everyone was thinking but nobody wanted to acknowledge? Lost forever. Most leadership teams justify these omissions with variations of: “That’s just internal politics. It’s unprofessional. The new executive needs our decisions, not our dirty laundry.” This thinking is precisely backwards. Why Messy Origin Stories Create Strategic Ownership Consider two incoming executives facing the same strategic direction. Executive A receives polished slide decks explaining the final strategic framework. Clean. Professional. Complete. Executive B receives the full origin story: the triggering incident, the initial resistance, the data that changed minds, the fierce debates, the breakthrough moments, the implementation battles. Three months later, both executives face pressure to abandon elements of the strategy. Market conditions have shifted. Key stakeholders are pushing for different priorities. Quick wins from alternative approaches look tempting. Executive A, having only received conclusions, treats the strategy as inherited wisdom. They lack emotional investment. When challenged, they can recite the framework but can’t defend its foundations. They become susceptible to any argument that sounds reasonable because they never witnessed why alternative approaches were rejected. Executive B, understanding the battle scars, responds differently. They know which assumptions were tested and survived. They understand which stakeholder concerns were addressed and how. They recognize which seductive alternatives were explicitly considered and rejected, and why. This knowledge creates conviction. The messiness isn’t an embarrassing artifact to hide. It’s the mechanism that transforms a successor from a strategy executor into a strategy guardian. Without origin stories, you’re handing someone a map without teaching them how to read terrain. They can follow the route you marked, but they can’t navigate when conditions change. How Mental Models Beat Exhaustive Analysis The second critical gap involves transferring strategic thinking patterns rather than strategic conclusions. Your comprehensive transition documents provide analysis. What incoming executives actually need are the model that generated that analysis. Consider a healthcare organization undertaking strategic transformation. Traditional handoff approach: a 200-page document detailing market research, competitive positioning, customer segmentation, channel strategy, technology roadmap, and financial projections. Alternative approach: “We’re becoming the Netflix of healthcare.” That single sentence does more strategic work than 200 pages ever could. It instantly conveys: subscription relationships over transactional interactions, integrated digital experiences instead of fragmented touchpoints, platform thinking rather than service delivery, customer lifetime value over point-of-sale margins. An incoming executive who internalizes this pattern can make hundreds of subsequent decisions aligned with strategic intent—without referring back to documentation. The pattern provides a mental model for evaluating new opportunities, prioritizing resources, and making trade-offs. Analysis answers specific questions. Patterns teach strategic thinking. Most transition documents fail here because outgoing executives don’t explicitly name the strategic patterns they’re using. These frameworks remain implicit—obvious to the departing leader but invisible to their successor. Creating Genuine Strategic Urgency The third missing element is the diagnostic story that explains why the current strategy became necessary. Generic problem statements fill transition documents: “Market conditions are evolving.” “We need to maintain competitive advantage.” “Customer expectations are changing.” These platitudes don’t create urgency. They create checkbox compliance. Contrast that with a genuine diagnostic story: “Our analysis revealed we were Blockbuster in 2005. We had dominant market share, strong brand recognition, and profitable operations. We were also completely vulnerable. While we defended a dying business model, our industry’s Netflix equivalent was growing 40% annually. Our window for strategic response was roughly 18 months before our competitive position would become unrecoverable.” That’s a diagnostic story with teeth. It explains why inaction represented an existential threat, not merely a missed opportunity. It creates urgency by making the stakes visceral and the timeline concrete. Start Building Your Strategic Story Library Today Most executives struggle to capture these three story types because they haven’t developed pattern recognition for what makes strategic stories effective. You need exposure to dozens of transformation cases before your mind identifies the underlying structures. The solution? Deliberate practice with real business transformation narratives. Start by studying how successful leaders explain their strategic pivots. Look for moments when executives describe “how we nearly missed this” or “why we became the [X] of our industry.” These moments contain the raw material for powerful strategic stories. But finding quality transformation case studies scattered across YouTube and business media takes time—time most executives don’t have. That’s why platforms like StratCinema.org exist: to curate business transformation stories specifically for strategists developing this narrative fluency. Instead of algorithm-driven suggestions that keep you watching but not learning, you get carefully selected case studies that build pattern recognition. Your next leadership transition deserves better than polished slide decks. It requires origin stories that create ownership, pattern stories that transfer mental models, and diagnostic stories that sustain urgency. Document these with the same rigor you apply to financial controls, and your successor won’t just execute your strategy—they’ll defend and evolve it. P.S. Use AI to Capture Your Strategic Stories Don’t have time to craft these stories from scratch? Modern AI tools can help you extract and structure the strategic narratives already in your head. Here are three sets of prompts—one for each story type—that you can use with any large language model to develop handoff materials that actually transfer strategic thinking. Origin Story Prompts “I need to document how our [specific strategic initiative] actually came together. Help me structure an origin story by asking me questions about: What triggered our initial concern? What was the ‘oh s**t’ moment that made this urgent? Who were the initial skeptics and what convinced them? What data or insights contradicted our assumptions? What internal conflicts emerged during planning? Which alternatives did we seriously consider and reject? What breakthrough moment changed our approach? Walk me through these questions one at a time, then help me shape my answers into a compelling narrative that shows future leaders why this strategy emerged and what obstacles we overcame.” Pattern Story Prompts “Our strategy can be summarized as ‘[our approach]’ but I need to articulate the mental model behind it. Help me identify the pattern we’re following by asking: What successful company or strategy are we emulating? Wha

    14 min

  7. Feb 11

    Why Your 2050 Strategy Must Start Today: Lessons from a 15-Year Failure

    Will your organization survive the next 25 years? More importantly, are the decisions you’re making today planting the seeds of future irrelevance? The US Coast Guard wrestled with these questions and discovered something counterintuitive: to truly understand today’s challenges, you need to view them from 25 years in the future. Their Project Evergreen initiative proved this—but only after failing spectacularly for 15 years first. The Expensive Lesson: Brilliant Strategy, Zero Implementation Imagine pouring 15 years into strategic planning. Your organization assembles the best minds, conducts sophisticated scenario workshops, and produces detailed roadmaps. The forecasts are prescient. The analysis is sharp. The strategies are comprehensive. Then everything hits reality and dies on impact. This was Project Evergreen’s painful trajectory. Every strategic plan they delivered landed, in their words, “like most additional work at an office with an already full plate: dead on arrival.” Inbox after inbox received these plans. Nearly all went unimplemented. The Coast Guard had built “isolated, independent cogs” that required “considerable effort to forcefully engage into the many turning mechanisms” of actual organizational planning. Picture trying to force a rigid gear into machinery that’s already running—that’s what executing these strategies felt like for frontline teams. Why did meticulously crafted strategies produce such dismal results? The Question That Poisoned 15 Years of Planning For a decade and a half, Project Evergreen asked what seemed like a perfectly reasonable question: “What should the Coast Guard do?” If you’ve sat through strategic planning sessions, this probably sounds familiar. It’s typically the first question on the agenda. What should we do about artificial intelligence? How should we respond to digital transformation? What’s our climate change strategy? The problem isn’t obvious at first glance. This question appears logical, even necessary. But it creates a fatal dynamic. When you ask “What should we do?” you’re asking workshop participants—typically senior strategists and consultants—to prescribe solutions. These prescriptions then get handed down to implementers who weren’t in the room and didn’t shape the solutions. As the Coast Guard discovered, “the ideal people to do the job might not be in the room.” This creates what I call supply-side strategy: strategists manufacture solutions and push them onto implementers. Those solutions arrive as rigid directives disconnected from operational reality. The fundamental flaw isn’t that strategists are separated from implementers—there are simply too many implementers to fit in a retreat. The flaw is the question itself. Present-Forward Thinking: Perfect for Tactics, Fatal for Transformation That innocent-sounding question—”What should we do?”—invisibly locks your thinking into a present-forward orientation. Present-forward thinking starts with today. It analyzes current problems, extrapolates existing trends, and prescribes solutions based on incremental projections. This approach works brilliantly for everyday management. It’s ideal for hitting quarterly targets, solving operational problems, and managing predictable challenges. But for 25-year transformation? It’s disastrous. Why? Because present-forward thinking generates tactical responses to current conditions. It can’t account for fundamental shifts in your organization’s operating environment. It can’t help you prepare for demands that don’t yet exist. It treats the future as a slightly modified version of today. Case in point: In 2001, Kodak had abundant, recent evidence that digital photography was no threat to traditional business. The present-forward mindset dominated the thinking of executives and blocked the possibilities. Managers use present-forward thinking each day because it’s the default mode for problem-solving. But that’s exactly why it fails for long-range strategy. This familiar mode becomes invisible, and organizations apply it to challenges it was never designed to address. The Cognitive Shift That Changed Everything After 15 years of failure, the Coast Guard discovered the fundamental shift required: from present-forward to future-back thinking. This framework, developed by strategy theorists Mark Johnson and Josh Suskewicz, represents a complete cognitive reorientation. Instead of starting with today’s problems and projecting forward, you start with 2050’s probable demands and work backward. The new question becomes: “What demands will the organization face?” This isn’t semantic trickery. It’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about strategy. When the Coast Guard made this shift, they began identifying what they call “robust strategic needs”—outcomes required by specific long-term futures, each demanding particular strategic responses. Here’s the critical difference: prescriptive solutions constrain implementers. Strategic needs empower them. Prescriptions say “do this.” Strategic needs say “accomplish this outcome”—and then trust implementers to craft solutions suited to their specific contexts and the evolving reality they’re navigating. How Future-Back Thinking Works in Practice Project Evergreen now runs workshops that map multiple plausible 2050 scenarios. They explore various futures the Coast Guard might face—different geopolitical landscapes, climate conditions, technological capabilities, maritime threats. Then something critical happens. As the project team explained: “The solution space had to be left to the people who were actually going to implement the solution.” Instead of receiving detailed instructions, implementers receive strategic needs. They’re asked to “deconstruct and then reconstruct” these needs for their specific operational contexts. This approach works because objectives spanning 25 years can’t be prescribed with any accuracy. The future will unfold in unexpected ways. Game-changing strategies require flexible frameworks that can adapt as conditions evolve. Strategic needs provide that framework. Rigid tactical plans don’t. The result: Project Evergreen became what they call a “backdoor strategic contributor”—guiding organizational direction without constraining operational flexibility. The 2025 Payoff from 2050 Thinking Here’s where this approach delivers immediate value. Future-back thinking reveals which of today’s “urgent” priorities are actually superfluous. When you clearly understand the demands your organization will face in 25 years, some current problems simply fade in importance. The larger perspective exposes which fires are worth fighting and which will burn out on their own. This prevents wasting resources on solutions that won’t address actual long-term demands. It also transforms implementer motivation. Instead of following someone else’s prescriptions, teams gain the autonomy to design solutions matched to their reality. That autonomy—the flexibility to meet strategic needs in contextually appropriate ways—creates genuine engagement and inspiration. Applying This to Your Organization Consider your organization’s long-range planning through this lens. The present-forward approach asks: “What should we do about immediate challenges?” This generates aspirational goals—”become industry leader,” “achieve digital transformation,” “reach carbon neutrality”—often disconnected from implementation reality. These sound impressive in board presentations but provide little practical guidance for teams expected to deliver them. The future-back approach asks: “What demands will our organization face in 2050?” This identifies strategic needs that divisions must customize for their contexts. For example, rather than prescribing “implement AI across all functions, ”you might identify a strategic need for “decision-making capabilities that scale with data complexity.” Different departments can then develop solutions suited to their unique challenges—customer service might deploy conversational AI, logistics might focus on predictive routing, finance might build automated risk assessment. A flexible framework instead of a rigid mandate. The Counterintuitive Truth The Coast Guard’s expensive lesson offers a counterintuitive truth: you need tomorrow’s perspective to understand today’s priorities. Organizations that begin with present-forward thinking remain trapped in tactical responses to current conditions. They mistake busy-work for strategy. They confuse detailed plans with transformation. Organizations that embrace future-back thinking gain something more valuable: clarity about which current actions actually matter for long-term survival. That 25-year horizon isn’t about predicting the future perfectly. It’s about developing the perspective to distinguish signal from noise in the present. The question isn’t whether your organization will face existential demands by 2050. It will. The question is whether you’re building the strategic foundation today to meet those demands—or whether you’re sowing the seeds of irrelevance while obsessing over quarterly results. The answer starts with asking a different question. Source: Project Evergreen’s Long-Range Strategic Planning, United States Naval Institute This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe

    14 min

  8. Feb 8

    The YouTube Strategy School: Why Your MBA Didn’t Teach You Strategic Thinking

    Annie’s hands trembled as she reread the email from her CEO. “Let’s talk about developing your strategic capabilities.” She’d just earned her MBA with honors, landed a promotion to Chief Marketing Officer, and crushed her Strategic Planning course with an A-. Now, three weeks before Christmas, her boss wanted to discuss her lack of strategic thinking. The meeting went poorly. “You’re just not being strategic enough,” he said, arms crossed. “Can you give me specific examples?” Annie asked, pulling out her notebook. He waved his hand vaguely. “It’s hard to explain. I just know it when I see it.” She pressed for details. He offered hollow phrases about “seeing the big picture” and “thinking long-term.” Nothing concrete. Nothing actionable. By the time she left his office, both were frustrated. Now it’s January. Annie sits at her desk, surrounded by expensive textbooks and highlighted case studies, completely lost. She can recite Porter’s Five Forces backward. She built financial models that made her professors weep with joy. Yet somehow, she’s failing at the very thing her degree promised to teach. The brutal irony? Her CEO can’t articulate what strategic thinking actually is because he developed the skill unconsciously, through years of pattern recognition. Annie can’t demonstrate it because her MBA systematically removed the very experiences that build strategic intuition. They’re both trapped. And neither understands why. The MBA’s Fatal Flaw Annie isn’t alone in this predicament. Across boardrooms worldwide, formally trained managers struggle to translate their academic frameworks into real strategic insight. They possess intellectual tools but lack the deeper capability that separates strategic thinkers from strategic memorizers. Here’s what business schools won’t tell you: becoming genuinely strategic isn’t about learning more frameworks. It’s about understanding that strategy professionals operate in three distinct seasons—and most never experience the first two. Season 3: Creation and MobilizationThis is the visible season. Senior leaders gather to craft corporate strategy over one to three months. PowerPoint decks multiply. The C-Suite debates market positioning. Consultants bill impressive hours. This is what most people imagine when they picture “strategic work.” Season 2: Focused Skill BuildingBetween major strategic initiatives, professionals identify capability gaps and target specific learning. They read journals, attend workshops, and study new frameworks. MBA programs excel at teaching a few basic Season 2 skills. Season 1: Curiosity-Driven ExplorationThis is the secret season. The forgotten season. The season where strategic intuition actually develops. And it’s completely absent from formal business education. Warren Buffett’s Secret Curriculum To understand why Season 1 matters so profoundly, consider how Warren Buffett transformed Katherine Graham from overwhelmed newspaper heiress into one of America’s most respected CEOs. In 1963, 46-year old Graham suddenly inherited control of The Washington Post after her husband’s death. She’d been a housewife with zero business experience. Now she faced a company, competitors, and boardroom dynamics she didn’t understand. Terrified but determined, she reached out to Buffett for guidance. What happened next reveals everything about how strategic thinking actually develops. Buffett didn’t send her to business school. He didn’t recommend management textbooks. He didn’t even explain financial statements, despite being one of the world’s greatest investors. Instead, according to researcher Cedric Chin, Buffett quietly assembled a curated collection of annual reports from diverse companies across multiple industries. Then he sat with Graham and walked her through them, one by one. But here’s the crucial detail: they didn’t analyze balance sheets or scrutinize financial ratios. They discussed stories. Why did this CEO make that decision? What pattern do you notice across these three retail failures? How did this manufacturer navigate technological disruption? Over months of discussing hundreds of these narratives, Graham developed something more valuable than financial expertise. She built a mental library of business patterns—a sixth sense for recognizing strategic situations before they fully materialized. The result? A powerful 28-year tenure that transformed The Washington Post into a media powerhouse. Any MBA professor would dismiss Buffett’s approach as unscientific, inefficient, and impossible to grade. Yet it produced extraordinary results. Why? The Ill-Structured Domain Problem Corporate strategy isn’t like chess. Chess has clearly defined rules, limited possible moves, and objective evaluation of positions. Master chess by studying enough positions and you’ll reliably improve. Strategy operates differently. It’s what cognitive scientists call an “ill-structured domain”—a field where: * The rules constantly change * Problems arrive with incomplete information * Multiple valid solutions often exist * Varying contexts determine which frameworks apply * Pattern recognition trumps analytical rigor In ill-structured domains, you don’t become expert by memorizing frameworks. You develop expertise through massive exposure to varied cases, gradually building intuition about what patterns matter and which don’t. This is why Annie’s MBA, for all its rigor, failed her. Business schools teach Season 2 skills in Season 2 format: structured, analytical, framework-driven. But strategic intuition develops in Season 1, through unstructured, curiosity-driven exploration of countless business stories. Her professors taught her to dissect strategies. Buffett’s method taught Graham to recognize them in the wild. Annie’s Accidental Discovery Over the Christmas holidays, Annie found herself doing something she normally avoided: falling down a YouTube rabbit hole. It started innocently. She’d always wondered why Apple’s iPhone crushed Blackberry, Nokia, and Ericsson—giants that seemed untouchable until they weren’t. A Google search led her to a documentary video. That led to another. And another. Four hours later, having watched 21 videos spanning mobile phone history, product launches, and CEO interviews, she emerged with a strange new capability. She could now answer a question she’d never consciously considered: “What would I have done differently as CMO at Nokia?” But immediately, guilt set in. Had she just wasted an evening on the digital equivalent of binge-watching reality TV or TikTok? Shouldn’t she be reading the Harvard Business Review journal articles sitting in her queue? What Annie didn’t realize: she’d accidentally stumbled into Season 1 learning. That “wasted” evening accomplished something her expensive Strategic Planning course never could. By immersing herself in multiple failure narratives, she began building the pattern recognition library that expert strategists draw from automatically. One case study teaches frameworks. Twenty-one interconnected stories start building intuition. Building Your Own Season 1 Practice The transformation Annie needs won’t come from reading one more business book or taking another certification course. She needs to deliberately create her Season 1 practice. Here’s what that looks like: Consume voraciously, but with purpose.Watch YouTube documentaries about business failures. Read long-form narratives about company transformations. Follow industry evolution stories across decades. The key isn’t passive consumption—it’s exposing yourself to enough varied cases that patterns start emerging naturally. Ask the practitioner’s question.Don’t just absorb stories. Constantly ask: “What would I have done as CMO/CEO/strategist/consultant in this situation?” This active engagement transforms entertainment into training. Seek variety over depth initially.Early in Season 1, breadth matters more than depth. Sample retail failures, tech disruptions, manufacturing transformations, and service industry evolution. Cross-industry patterns are often more valuable than industry-specific expertise. Let curiosity lead.Unlike Season 2’s targeted learning, Season 1 works best when you follow genuine interest. That four-hour YouTube session worked for Annie because she authentically wanted to understand mobile phone competition. Connect consumption to creation.Eventually, Season 1 exposure fuels Season 2 learning, which prepares you for Season 3 execution. But the sequence matters. Don’t rush to application before you’ve built sufficient pattern recognition. The Real Competitive Advantage When Annie returns to her next major strategic initiative—her next Season 3 moment—she’ll show up differently. Not because she learned new frameworks, but because she’s developed strategic peripheral vision. She’ll recognize patterns her CEO can’t articulate but knows when he sees. She’ll spot familiar dynamics in unfamiliar situations. She’ll propose approaches that feel intuitively right, even if she can’t immediately explain why. This is what her boss meant by “strategic thinking.” Not framework mastery. Pattern fluency. And her company becomes the ultimate beneficiary. Now they have a CMO who brings genuine strategic intuition to every discussion—the kind of thinking that can’t be faked, purchased, or crammed before a meeting. It just has to be grown, season by season, story by story. ——————————— P.S. You are invited to share in my compilation of strategy-related YouTube videos at StratCinema.org P.P.S. This article is based on a column I wrote for the Jamaica Gleaner. P.P.P.S. Here are some LLM prompts you can use for further learning. Here are instructions and 5 prompts for readers developing strategic fluency: Before Using These Prompts Copy and pa

    15 min
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There are significant challenges facing Caribbean companies. In the areas of strategic planning and productivity improvements, unique thinking is needed to break out of historical norms. But such thinking isn’t easy to find. Join me, Francis Wade, for some provocative insights into the way I see these problems. These are mostly audio editions of past Gleanr articles. longtermstrategy.substack.com

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