Becoming a strategic thinker is about opening your mind to possibilities. It’s about seeing the bigger picture. It’s about understanding the various parts of your business, taking them apart, and then putting them back together again in a more powerful way. It’s about insight, invention, emotion and imagination focused on reshaping some part of the world.

The task of the strategist and leadership team is to reduce uncertainty in the areas that they can directly influence in order to pursue attractively difficult objectives.

How much time have you invested in thinking about strategy? How many options have you considered before the plan was written? How have you ensured that the thinking behind the plan is challenged? How much time do you spend exploring trends, possibilities and cool stuff? How much time is spent playing with ideas, hopes and dreams?

Strategy is about shaping the future.

Change is not overcoming inertia as much as it is redirecting, guiding, tweaking what already is and what has already happened. We must believe that we can make choices and that those choices can alter the future.

If you change the rules of the market, you can be more successful than your competitors.

Strategy is about out-thinking your competition. Mark Zuckerberg, while at Harvard, built a website called Facemash ‘for fun’. Even today, Facebook believe that ‘done is better than perfect’.