McKinsey Classics | May 2024

Creating a strategy dream team

How many members of your top team are involved in shaping your company’s strategic direction? If you needed fewer fingers than you have on one hand to answer that question, your team may need to be reshuffled. These days, disruption wears many faces, so the more senior leaders an organization has flexing their collective strategic muscles the better.

The good news is any executive can become more strategic. To start, make sure you really know the strategy of your specific industry. Generic strategy frameworks are just that: generic. When forming an appropriately nuanced strategy, context is everything. Next, know your disrupter. Bolstering your top team with a diverse range of perspectives and expertise can help ensure you’re sufficiently covering—and outthinking—the competition. Finally, innovate on ways to communicate your strategy so that everyone has a firm grasp on its direction.

Strategy can no longer be the purview of one person. An endless array of competing forces demands a dynamic strategy team—one where each person is firing on all cylinders. To help craft your strategy dream team, read Michael Birshan and Jayanti Kar’s 2012 McKinsey Quarterly classic, “Becoming more strategic: Three tips for any executive.”

— Drew Holzfeind, editor, Chicago