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Perpetual: Reads | The Strategist

Our series of book recommendations to empower talent and fuel brands.

The Strategist

Why Perpetual recommends it

Cynthia Montgomery’s The Strategist, drawn from her work teaching at Harvard Business School, makes an argument that’s easy to agree with in theory and genuinely hard to practise: strategy is not a task to delegate to a planning department, it’s the ongoing, personal responsibility of the leader, and being the strategist is fundamentally different from simply approving a strategic plan.

Montgomery pushes back on the idea that strategy is primarily an analytical exercise completed once a year in an offsite. Instead, she frames it as a continuous act of defining and protecting a company’s unique identity and purpose, something a leader has to keep actively shaping as conditions change, not something that gets finalised and filed away.

The book is particularly strong on the discipline of saying no. Montgomery argues that a clear strategy is defined as much by what a company deliberately refuses to do as by what it chooses to pursue, and that leaders who can’t say no to attractive but off-strategy opportunities usually end up with a blurred, weakened position over time.

This lines up closely with how we coach executive teams through strategy work: the plan itself matters less than the leader’s ongoing discipline in defending it against constant, reasonable-sounding pressure to drift.

  • Strategy is an ongoing personal responsibility of the leader, not a document to delegate
  • Being the strategist means continuously shaping identity and purpose as conditions change
  • A clear strategy is defined by what you refuse to do as much as what you pursue
  • Saying no to attractive but off-strategy opportunities protects strategic clarity over time

A practical test for any leadership team is listing the last three attractive opportunities you said no to, if the list is short, that’s usually a sign strategic discipline needs strengthening.

We give this book four out of five stars.

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