➕LEVEL UP YOUR STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP ➟ I share proven systems, actionable tips, and lessons from 20+ years of helping CEOs make better strategy ➕STRATEGY ADVISOR TO CEOs + THEIR TEAMS ➟ Learn more in my ABOUT section👇

Most professionals reach a point in their career where the rules change — quietly.

What used to matter most — execution, reliability, getting things done — stops being what earns trust.

Suddenly, the conversations shift.
The decisions get murkier.
And you’re no longer being asked for your performance only, but for your strategic leadership.

That moment is rarely named.

But every senior professional eventually feels it.

It’s the moment when strategic responsibility expands faster than your preparation for it.

And that’s where most leadership development stops helping.

I built The Better Strategy School to close that gap.

Not by offering more frameworks or theories.
But by creating an environment where serious professionals can develop strategic leadership — deliberately, while their work is live.

Inside the School, members learn to:
– Frame issues clearly when clarity is incomplete
– Make trade-offs visible — and stand behind them
– Hold direction when others are still negotiating it
– Lead with coherence instead of control

It’s not about knowing more.

It’s about thinking, deciding, and leading differently.

After two decades of working with leaders and organizations navigating complexity, one thing became clear:

Strategy isn’t a document.
It isn’t a plan.

It’s the ongoing ability to make coherent choices under uncertainty — and to help others align around them.

That ability isn’t taught in most leadership programs.

It’s practiced — through live tension, real trade-offs, and reflection.

That’s what we do here.

If you’re an experienced professional who’s ready to:
– Strengthen how you think, not just what you know
– Lead strategy with calm confidence under pressure
– Develop judgment you can trust when conditions change

You’ll feel at home in this work.

Most leadership development doesn’t prepare you for this shift.
It gives you frameworks when what you need is judgment.

And here’s the truth most people never name:
Strategy becomes your responsibility long before it becomes your title.

That’s the moment this work exists for.

So the question isn’t whether strategy is coming for you — it already has.

The question is:
How do you want to prepare?

If you’re ready to develop strategic leadership deliberately — this is where you begin.

📍 Learn more → www.makebetterstrategy.com
📩 Or connect directly: team@makebetterstrategy.com

Marc Sniukas

The customer is not the center of strategy.

Most leaders I meet believe this is heresy.

But the observation keeps recurring in practice.

When strategy is reduced to customer value alone, the firm slowly erodes its own capacity to compete.

What often goes unnoticed is that sustainable strategy requires coherence across three value domains simultaneously.

The customer must benefit.

The firm must benefit.

And the ecosystem — partners, suppliers, adjacent players — must also see advantage in participating.

Collapse this to one dimension, and the system becomes unstable.

In practice, this shows up when a brilliant customer innovation drains resources the firm cannot replenish.

Or when ecosystem partners quietly disengage because the value exchange became asymmetrical.

The most durable strategies I've observed operate at the intersection.

They make deliberate trade-offs between these constituencies rather than optimizing for any single one.

This is not stakeholder theory reheated.

It is a structural feature of how value creation systems actually function.

The uncomfortable truth: many strategy failures look like customer problems on the surface.

They are actually coherence problems underneath.

The firm created value for buyers it could not afford to sustain.

Or prioritized returns that hollowed out the partnerships it later needed.

This tension doesn't resolve with better customer research.

It requires holding multiple value logics in mind at once.

And making choices that feel suboptimal from any single perspective.

Most strategic planning processes are not designed for this.

They optimize one horizon and delegate the others to "execution."

This is where competitive advantage quietly breaks down.

Dr. Marc Sniukas

Founder, The Better Strategy School → Where strategy becomes a leadership capability. 20+ years of global strategy work, helping leadership teams make better strategy.

Strategy, strategic thinking, and
strategic leadership are not the same thing.

Most people use them interchangeably.

That conflation is where a lot of organizational confusion quietly begins.

1️⃣ Strategy is the coherent approach an organization uses to overcome its key challenges and make its ambitions achievable.

It is not a document. Not a plan. Not a list of initiatives produced once a year and reviewed quarterly.

It is an ongoing practice of diagnosing situations, making consequential choices, and aligning action — so the organization can move forward despite uncertainty and constraint.

2️⃣ Strategic thinking is something different.

It is an individual capability. The ability to decide what truly matters, when many things seem important.

More precisely: the capacity to diagnose complex situations, make consequential choices under uncertainty, and align action — not as a cognitive style, not as a personality trait, but as applied judgment in a social system.

3️⃣ Strategic leadership is different again.

It is not primarily about deciding the strategy.

It is about making the organization capable of acting strategically.

That requires three things: direction — clarifying what matters most and what trade-offs are accepted; environment — designing the conditions that make the right behavior easier; and mobilization — converting intent into coordinated action.

In practice, most strategies fail not because they were poorly written.

They fail because nobody orchestrated coordinated action around difficult choices.

The strategy existed. The strategic thinking may have been sound.

But the leadership practice — the direction, the environment, the mobilization — was absent.

What often goes unnoticed is that these three things operate at different levels.

Strategic thinking is a capability. Strategy is an approach. Strategic leadership is a practice.

Developing one does not automatically develop the others.

A leader can think strategically and still produce an incoherent strategy.

An organization can have a coherent strategy and still fail to make it show up in daily decisions.

👉 This is where the distinction stops being academic.

– You can have strategic thinkers without a strategy → intelligent discussions, no alignment.

– You can have a strategy without strategic leadership → a document, not behavior.

– You can have leadership activity without strategy → activity without direction.

Make Better Strategy: Which of the three is the weakest link in your organization?

📌 Download the hi-res pdf of this document: https://lnkd.in/dUJwCwUR

👉 Share to help someone in your network make better strategy.

‼️ Follow Dr. Marc Sniukas for more insights on real strategy.

Strategy, Thinking, Leadership - Definitions

Sanford Royce

Sanford Royce is a global media and communications network with over 300+ assets and properties in
business, finance, healthcare, and sports. 
As a Board Advisory member, I help oversee the Editorial Integrity and Partnership opportunities for the network.

Member of the Board of Advisors

BIED Society

Chairman of the Board of Regents

Manage strategic educational direction, knowledge management, and international initiatives.
Manage staff, financial operations, marketing, publishing, sales, & international affiliations.

***Currently taking applications for International Affairs Fellows, Senior Fellows, and Policy Commissioners for 2023-2024.  You can fill out an application at www.biedsociety.com. ***
          Fellowships and Senior Fellowships are 2 years
          Policy Commissioners are three year terms

Looking for Researchers in:

                    International Defense Policy
                    International Cyber Security Policy
                    International Energy Policy
                    Behavioral Economic Policy
                    International Aviation & Space Policy
                    International Development Policy
                    International Women's Rights Policy
                    International Health Policy
                    International Law & Criminal Justice Policy
                    International Diplomacy Policy
                    U.S. Congressional Affairs
                    International Journalism
                    South America Policy
                    Africa Policy
                    Eurasia Policy
                    Middle East Policy
                    India Policy
                    China Policy

Washington D.C.- United States,           London - United Kingdom,                 Hong Kong, China



San Diego - California, Raleigh-North Carolina, New York City, New York, Frankfurt, Germany, Toronto, Canada

Behavioral Economist (PhD)

Manage the International Economic Fellowship Program.

Strategic Research direction and focus.

Editor in Chief to all economic publications.

Senior Research Economist

Office of the Secretary of Defense

Senior Defense Advisor (PhD) promoting key scientists and researchers to address critical priorities.

Senior Economist-Oversight & Compliance, Office of the Secretary of Defense (OCMO)

Work for the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Engineering

Director of Systems Engineering Outreach (PhD)

The George Washington University

International Health Policy Research
U.S. Congressional Budgets
International Behavioral Economics
Behavioral International Economic Development Growth Path Model (BIED-GPM)

Faculty PhD- Health Policy, Researcher

Air Force Acquisition

Defense Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition (SAF/AQE) (OBX TEK)  Helping support the National Security Strategy through Smarter and Faster Acquisition policy and practice.

Senior Advisor, Congressional & Strategic Communications

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

Counter Terrorism, Counter Intelligence, National Security, Criminal, Financial, FISA, etc.  Privacy Act Task Force.  Protecting Americans, America, and the Constitution of the United States. (FCI/PAE)

Department of Justice Research Analyst (PhD)

US Army

Deputy Chief, Senate Liaison Division

U.S. Department of the Treasury

Rotated between several Federal Government Agencies as a Presidential Management Fellow.

Presidential Management Fellow- International Trade Specialist (SBA);Performance Budgeting(Treasury)

USAID

Worked out of the Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs (OAPA), detailed to NATO Training Mission Afghanistan (NTM-A), Afghan Public Protection Force Advisory Group (APPF AAG) working from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul to promote the State owned Enterprise operations as a Financial Economist.

Foreign Service Officer- NATO Economic Advisor

United States Marine Corps

Deployed to the Asia Pacific for four years.

Operation Al Faher, Fallujah, Iraq.

National Security Fellow- Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies, Hawaii.

Marine Corps Financial Officer

The BIED Society is an International Think Tank based out of Washington DC. Our mission is to bring together key professions that impact national security and international policy. Diplomats, Defense, and Development professionals are joined with PhD's, marketing, advertising, and branding teams. We use our publications to build our members skills and encourage interaction between professions. The key component to the interaction is our unique conference schedule on Cruise ships. This makes a perfect place to get away from the office or school, network, see new countries & cultures, and have fun. Our program is strong and getting attention from traditional academic universities. Life long learning doesn't end with your degree, we need to sharpen our skills and the BIED Society is a great place to do just this. Please review the website at www.biedsociety.com and if you have interest in submitting research for publication or in our fellowship program please fill out the Fellowship Interest Form to get more information. Waiting for the perfect job to come to you is one option, or you can take control of your career and network, travel, build your skills & experiences, and meet internationally minded professionals like you.  Things I am interested in public diplomacy, International relations, fellowships, diplomats, interagency, Journalists, Public Information, Press conferences, spokesperson, talking points, High-level communication efforts, op-eds, economics, development, and international collaboration.

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