As your company grows, you have to actively seek honest feedback. To get that:

• Encourage and exemplify honest, rigorous debriefs to extract lessons
• Shift course quickly if you realize you're off track
• Celebrate both successes and (well-intentioned) failures that ...

A strategic leader must foster open dialogue, build trust, and engage key stakeholders, especially when views diverge. To pull that off:

• Understand what drives other people's agendas
• Bring tough issues to the surface, however uncomfortable
• Assess risk tolerance a...

You have to develop processes and enforce them to arrive at a “good enough” position. To do that well:

• Carefully frame the decision to get to the crux of the matter
• Balance speed, rigor, quality, and agility. Leave perfection to higher powers
• Take a stand even wi...

A good strategic leader holds steady, synthesizing information from many sources before developing a viewpoint. To do this well:

• Seek patterns in multiple sources of data
• Encourage others to do the same
• Question prevailing assumptions and test multiple hypotheses si...

Following conventional wisdom eventually leads to loss of competitive advantage. Critical thinkers question everything. To master this:

• Reframe problems to get to the roots of it
• Challenge current beliefs and mindsets, including your own
• Uncover hypocrisy, manipulat...

Most companies only focus on what’s directly ahead. This can leave your company vulnerable to rivals who detect and act on ambiguous signals. To anticipate well:

• Look for game-changing information at the periphery of your industry
• Search beyond the current boundaries of ...