The Five Faces Of Strategy

read on Forbes

A few weeks back, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who’s the Chief Strategy Officer for a large technology company. He’d been feeling pretty frustrated for a while.

Before he joined, the company had been on an acquisition streak, gobbling up smaller competitors and technology providers. The CEO decided they needed a strategy guy with real M&A chops. That’s when they hired my friend. He has decades of experience making deals, and he quickly got to work scouting and vetting potential candidates.

Of course, that’s when things changed. The Fed woke up from its dream of transitory inflation and began to raise rates. While valuations were still high, capital was no longer cheap. The free-money era was over.

Overnight, my friend’s job description changed, too. All major M&A activity was put on hold. Instead, the CEO started relying on the strategy team to answer one seemingly random query after another. What was happening in a particular market? How serious was a new competitive threat? Why was one of the businesses struggling? To my friend, it felt like a distraction from the real strategy work he’d been hired to do. Maybe the company didn’t need a Chief Strategy Officer after all.

That didn’t sound right to me. The company was confronting a changing competitive landscape, an uncertain economy, and the sudden arrival of generative AI. If anything, it needed a strategy function more than ever. The problem was what that word strategy meant in the first place.

The title Chief Strategy Officer may be one of the most misleading in business. The people who hold it can spend their days doing radically different work, based on very different ideas about how a company shapes its future. Recognizing those differences is critical for a leader trying to understand the job they’ve been hired to do, or how that job may have changed. Strategy has five faces.

The Acquirer

The Acquirer sees strategy through the lens of a portfolio. They ask which businesses the company should own, which capabilities it should buy, and which assets it should leave behind. This face is powerful when the future demands something that would take too long to build from within. Disney has used acquisitions like Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox to change what the company could become.

A present-focused Acquirer uses deals to strengthen the portfolio the company already has. A future-focused Acquirer buys capabilities, technologies, and business models that can change what the company is able to become. Because they value preparing over predicting, the best Acquirers seek deals that will help a company adapt as the future becomes clearer. That was the job my friend was hired to do. But then the company needed him to become an Analyst.

The Analyst

The Analyst sees strategy through the lens of a problem. They ask what’s really happening, why it’s happening, and what choices the company has in response. They bring structure to ambiguous situations and develop clear recommendations for what leaders should do. Under Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase has relied on strategy teams to investigate unfamiliar problems, challenge the way questions have been framed, and develop options for senior leaders.

To be sure, the value that an Analyst provides depends on how questions are framed. A present-focused Analyst tackles problems the company is already facing. A future-focused Analyst looks for important questions before they become urgent. At their most future focused, Analysts become innovators, helping the organization imagine choices it couldn’t see before.

Sometimes a recommendation is all a company needs. In other cases, large-scale change is the real issue. That’s when a company needs a Transformer.

The Transformer

The Transformer is asked to help the company evolve. They take on large-scale efforts that cut across businesses and functions. They redesign the operating model: how decisions get made, how teams work together, and how value flows through the organization. Their job is to make the company capable of doing things that its current structures and habits won’t allow. At Ford, Alan Mulally implemented a One Ford strategy, centralizing regional businesses around common vehicle platforms, shared production plans, and a weekly leadership review.

A present-focused Transformer improves the operating model the company already has. A future-focused Transformer builds the operating model the company will need next. Because they value abilities over assets, they invest in the people, systems, and habits that will allow the organization to keep adapting long after the transformation program ends.

The Planner

The Planner sees strategy through the lens of resource allocation. They turn a company’s ambitions into key objectives and investment priorities. They can help ensure that commitments across the enterprise add up to a coherent whole. At Boeing, every new aircraft program demands the coordination of billions of dollars, thousands of engineers, global suppliers, and manufacturing capacity years before the first plane enters service. The Planner turns a distant idea for an aircraft into the interlocking commitments required to make it fly.

A present-focused Planner translates the company’s existing priorities into an annual plan. A future-focused Planner moves resources toward opportunities that are still taking shape. Future-focused Planners understand that every budget is implicitly a bet on which version of the future the company is preparing to meet.

The Chief of Staff

Some companies organize strategy around the agenda of the CEO. That’s when a Chief Strategy Officer needs to act like a Chief of Staff. They turn the CEO’s ambitions into initiatives, create a cadence for making decisions, and keep those decisions from disappearing into the organization. This face can be especially powerful when a company is led by a visionary who sees the destination more clearly than the path for getting there.

A present-focused Chief of Staff keeps the CEO’s current agenda on track. A future-focused Chief of Staff helps shape the agenda around what’s coming next. They can draw the CEO’s attention to changes that haven’t yet become urgent and make sure the demands of today don’t consume all the space needed to think about tomorrow.

Looking Forward

All five of these roles are valuable. And yet, all five can get consumed by the present. The Analyst can spend all their time answering urgent but unimportant requests. The Acquirer can get stuck reacting to whatever deals their banker walks in with. The Transformer can get mired in office politics. The Planner can be reduced to managing PowerPoint templates. And the Chief of Staff can just keep chasing whatever’s annoying the CEO on any given day.

Some of that work may be necessary. But it doesn’t become strategy simply because the strategy team is doing it. Strategy is inherently future focused. Most organizations already have plenty of people paying attention to the present. Sales is trying to make this quarter’s numbers. Operations is working to improve performance. Finance is watching costs. The entire operating system of a company exerts a gravitational pull toward the here and now.

The strategy function should provide a counterweight. It should pay attention to changes that haven’t yet become urgent, needs that customers may not yet be expressing, technologies that are still developing, and competitors that don’t yet look dangerous. Its job is to make sure the future gets a voice before it has the power to force itself into the room.

Strategy leaders have an opportunity—and a responsibility—to help the organization lift its eyes to the horizon. They can make sense of what’s changing, create options before they’re urgently needed, and give people the confidence to move while the path is still taking shape. They can help the company become an active creator of what comes next, no matter how their role is defined.

Strategy has five faces. Every one of them should be looking forward.