Is strategy the real work now?
23 June 2026
For a long time, strategy was treated as a specialist function: something management consultants were paid to parachute in and articulate, something a CEO or a board did in an offsite once a year, something with its own vocabulary and slide format that most of the organization never touched. Everyone else was simply expected to execute whatever strategy had decided. That division made a kind of sense when execution was expensive and slow enough to fully occupy a person's day. That may not make the most sense anymore. Strategic judgment now shows up at every level and in every function, not because the discipline of strategy changed, but because the work that used to crowd it out has gone quiet.
Strategy is generally direction, tactics generally execution. But the former lives inside the latter too. Strategy decides where the organisation is headed: which markets are worth entering, which capabilities to build versus rent, the kind of calls that feed the company's mission and values. It's made with incomplete information, over a long horizon, and a wrong call here doesn't show up for months or years — by which point it's expensive to undo. Tactical work is what that direction looks like once it has to actually happen on the ground: how to ship this without compounding debt, how hard to push on this account, whether a complaint is routine or a warning sign worth escalating. The decision is smaller and faster, but it's still a decision — weighing options, accepting a trade-off, committing to one read of the situation over another. Strategy points the organisation somewhere; tactics is the daily work of getting there without losing the plot, and doing that well has always required a sliver of the same judgment strategy runs on at full scale.
Strategy used to look like a well-presented document, made once and handed down from the top, while everyone below it simply executed. Now both kinds of decision happen everywhere, in smaller pieces, made constantly, by people who'd never call what they're doing strategy — and the split shows up in some form across every function. Take a product manager: which problem deserves the roadmap this quarter is a real strategic call, even if phrasing the ticket so engineering doesn't misread it is just execution. Developers live the same split between build-versus-buy and the shape of today's function. Marketers feel it as the gap between choosing an audience worth the brand's attention and picking which of ten headlines ships this afternoon. Operations tends to run the order in reverse — handling today's exception without breaking the queue is the small move, deciding the process itself shouldn't exist is the big one — and customer service compresses both into a single moment: bending a policy for the person in front of you, then phrasing the exception so it doesn't become precedent. Finance has its own version, spotting which assumption in the model is quietly doing too much work versus flagging it without derailing the meeting. In sales it is which account is worth chasing, and how hard to push on today's call. None of these people have "strategist" in their title — most are doing both kinds of thinking inside the same hour, often without noticing the difference.
In the AI world, the shape of work itself is changing. The tasks that used to fill most of a day — the boilerplate, the first draft, the routine report, the standard reconciliation — are quietly disappearing into agents and tools that just do them now. Tactical decisions are increasingly getting automated or left to review. What's left for people is the part that was always harder: the directional calls, the trade-offs with no clean right answer, the problems that need diagnosing before anyone can even start solving them. Work is moving from doing to deciding, from output to judgment, from busy to hard. There's less of it, in volume. But what's left takes more out of a person, because there's nowhere left to hide behind activity.
Strategy was never confined to the boardroom in the first place. It just used to have somewhere to hide — behind execution, behind volume, behind the part of the job that took up all the hours. That hiding place is now getting harder to find. What's left, at every desk and every level, is the deciding. Which is another way of saying: everyone has to work strategically now, whether their title says so or not.
