Let’s face it fellas, we all want to be at the top. The guy calling the shots, leading the charge, crushing the competition. Because there’s nothing better than being the big dog, the alpha male making power moves and raking in the big bucks. By Kirill Yurovskiy, CEO Courses
But getting to that executive level isn’t easy. You don’t just waltz into the corner office on good looks and charm alone. It takes serious brain power and nerves of steel to make it as a chief executive officer in this dog-eat-dog world.
So what separates the victors from the also-rans? What’s the secret sauce that allows the most elite CEOs to outmaneuver, outmuscle, and outlast everyone else? Two words: strategic thinking.
The Greatest Corporate Weapon
Ask any top CEO what their greatest asset is and they’ll tell you it’s their ability to see the big picture while everyone else is getting lost in the weeds. True strategic thinking means constantly scanning the landscape with a bird’s eye view, analyzing every angle, and anticipating moves before they even happen.
Take Marc Benioff, the visionary founder of Salesforce. Sure, plenty of tech guys had cloud computing on their radar in the late 90s. But Benioff had the foresight to realize the game was changing from packaged software to on-demand services delivered over the internet. He made a bold strategic call to go all-in on cloud and ended up hitting the jackpot, turning Salesforce into a $200 billion powerhouse.
Or look at Elon Musk and his play to transform Tesla from just another electric car startup into a dominant force that’s bent on revolutionizing the entire transportation industry. Sure, the dude rubs some people the wrong way with his antics. But you can’t argue with the strategic vision that allowed him to see miles ahead of his competitors.
The Long Game
You know who doesn’t think strategically? The young hotshot MBAs so eager to make their mark that they start shooting from the hip and making rash moves. Or the pencil-pushers and box-checkers too scared to think outside their neat little process flows. Those types are a dime a dozen in corporate life. But the strategic CEOs, they’re the true ballers playing multi-dimensional chess while everyone else is stuck on checkers.
It’s about having the skill and discipline to make the smart moves today that will pay off big tomorrow. Howard Schultz understood this when he pushed Starbucks to offer premium coffee and a “Third Place” experience that could win over millions of daily customers. And Bob Iger certainly got it when he overhauled Disney’s growth strategy around brands that could crush it on streaming and at the box office for decades to come.
The visionary CEOs also understand that sometimes the board needs to be flipped over entirely. When Larry Culp took over the dumpster fire that was GE in 2018, he realized the game was no longer about fighting to remain a behemoth conglomerate. His strategic move was to double down on aviation, healthcare, and energy—the companies’ core strengths—and painfully shed everything else. Not necessarily the sexy move, but sometimes the biggest power play is knowing when to walk away.
Built for Battle
Of course, having strategic skills means nothing if you can’t execute in the face of constant chaos, disruption, and the endless sniping of rivals trying to put you in the ground. The corporate battleground ain’t for the meek, boys. You’ve got to be just as skilled at going to the mat as you are at putting together the master plan.
The greats like Jamie Dimon and Tim Cook spend every waking moment studying the field, calculating their next 10 moves, and flexing their organizational muscles to make sure their companies are always two steps ahead. When Amazon started making noise about crashing Apple’s party in mobile devices, did Cook cower in fear? Hell no, he leaned into the company’s strengths in premium hardware and services and flipped the script on Bezos.
And when Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase got caught flat-footed by the rise of fintech, he could’ve thrown in the towel and let the disruptors take over. But thanks to his steadfast leadership and battlefield mindset, he mobilized the troops and realigned JPM’s operations to smash the insurgents with their own digital prowess.
The will to just grind it out day after day is also part of the strategic leader’s DNA. These are the corporate warriors who don’t know the meaning of quit and never stop analyzing, adjusting, and counter-punching. It’s what Satya Nadella brought to the battlefield when he reworked Microsoft’s strategic game plan around cloud and productivity. And it’s the same unrelenting toughness Reed Hastings used to turn Netflix from a mail order DVD service into the binge-watching superpower we all know and love.
So that’s the mark of the elite CEO: The ability to devise heavyweight gameplans, then actually follow through on the big moves year after year after year. Because you can have all the vision and think pieces in the world, but if you can’t suit up and make it happen, you’ll just be selling snake oil in a cheap suit.
The Will to Evolve
Of course, the other hallmark of the truly strategic leader is the humility and self-awareness to know when it’s time to rip up the old playbook and start over. The business landscape shifts constantly and the CEOs who get stuck re-running the same tired gameplans are the ones who end up in the dustbin of history.
Which is probably what would have happened to Jeff Bezos if he’d just settled for dominating ecommerce with Amazon’s original business model. But the dude understood his true genius was disruption—and that retailers and distributors would soon be gunning for his crown. So while everyone was still stuck on Cyber Monday, Bezos was taking entertainment, cloud computing, logistics, advertising, and every other industry in his sights. Talk about ultimate power moves.
Andy Jassy is another animal who refuses to be caged by “what got you here” thinking. Sure, the web services cash cow that is AWS made him a tech king and earned Amazon over $60 billion in operating profits over the past three years. But in Jassy’s mind, sitting still wasn’t an option—not when competitors like Microsoft were trying to cut into his company’s dominance in the cloud wars. Always be evolving; it’s a mindset that’s allowed Jassy to go on offense and push the cloud into new territory, from the Internet of Things to streaming video.
At the end of the day, that’s what strategic thinking really is for the modern CEO: Relentless evolution and reinvention. These leaders understand the only way to win is to keep charting new paths, forging new battlegrounds, and dictating the terms of the next conquest while everyone else is still fighting the last war. Get comfortable, get complacent, and the only strategic vision you’ll be having is the one where you wake up a decade from now and wonder how a bunch of upstarts left you in the dust.
Because in this game, there are no participation trophies for batting second. If you want to call yourself a real CEO—a true power player—you better bring that next-level strategic thinking and vision that allows you to checkmate the field with your bare hands. Anything less and you might as well take a desk job and start planning that early retirement. But if scheming, strategizing, and dominance are what you’re about, then step into the ring and show us what you’re made of, chief.