"Strategy" is a word that attracts a lot of excitement in the business world. People who work on strategy get paid more and senior executives like to use the word a lot to talk about their decisions.

In consulting, I worked with many companies helping them to develop strategies. Although these were often focused on different levels of the business and different topics, all of the "strategies" were similar. They each included:

1. A synthesis of all of the relevant information about a company (trends, financials, expert perspectives, research, competitors, market, etc...)
2. A story of how the company leaders think about the future of the company
3. A set of specific initiatives that are a probabilistic bet on a specific future

Strategy Is Simple (Example: Pepsi)

Most people don't realize that you can find the strategy of most public companies by going to their investor relations page and then looking for recent presentations they have made at conferences. It is also included in most company's annual reports or 10-K.

Here is a page from a recent conference presentation Pepsi made to consumer equity analysts in New York:

It includes a high-level mission, vision, and then what they call the "PepsiCo Way." This is essentially the strategy.

While your first thought might be "this is too simple!" - there is a reason for that. In a company as big as Pepsi, simple is better. Simple enables the ideas to spread more easily. I guarantee a majority of the company knows that "Faster. Stronger. Better." is a core focus of the company.

At the highest level a strategy is a story. It's a story of where the company is headed and how that fits into a story of the future.

I'm not going to share the whole presentation here but if you go look at it you'll realize that there is a lot of thought behind this simple diagram. The presentation includes a detailed assessment of Pepsi's past, its current situation and then a lot of specific information about each of the three pillars.

For example, there are many pages of detail specific to "Stronger":

It lists a number of specific initiatives:

• Building capabilities
• Consumer centric innovation
• Holistic cost management

These may not mean anything to you, but typically each of these will included specific goals and targets. For example, there might be a company wide goal to launch 100 new products in the next year.

The way this is rolled out throughout the company is through formal meetings or strategy sessions. In these meetings, individual leaders of divisions will react to the high level targets and set their own goals for their group. There's often a bit of back and forth at this stage where people negotiate what they are able to reach. Bold goals might be great if you are able to meet them but if you fall short, that can really hurt your career.

There is much more to be said here but I really just wanted to give you the high level perspective of what strategy looks like.

So how can you use this to help you in your career?

Develop Your Own Strategic Perspective

I was talking to a friend last week who is stuck in the middle of a large organization. He was looking for ways to stand out and start working on more interesting projects.

I asked him, "what's your take on the company strategy?"

He had never thought about it.

Many people are in this position. It's very easy to get caught up in the day-to-day flow of work and never take a step back.

I shared a simple approach he could take to develop a perspective on the company and it's essentially the same process you might take working at the CEO-level of a large company.

There are nuances, but these are the steps I would take:

1. Find The Current Strategy: Like I mentioned before, if your company is a public company you will likely be able to find a strategy presentation on the investor relations page. Just google "investor relations" and your company and then look for the "Events & Presentations" page. Often companies make pitches at industry conferences and will share their strategies publicly to motivate investors to invest money in the company
2. Spend Time Being Curious: Gather information on the current state of the company, industry, market, and competitors. Read all you can and start talking to people inside the company. This is an ongoing practice and your views will shift over time
3. Develop a Perspective: Start to develop your own view of what the company is doing and connect it both to what your division is working on and what you are specifically interested in. Since you are not the CEO you are likely in a unique position to see more of the reality of how the company is really operating and what opportunities are ignored.
4. Share This, Slowly and Then More Broadly: Start testing this out on colleagues: "I think the company should be investing more in content, here is the X example of how they did this..." See how people react to it. The more you can connect it to what others are directly working on the more excited people will be.

This is an ongoing practice and the more curious you become about the company and the more you look to either work on projects that have a perspective on the future or you look to inject this into your own, the more others will pay attention.

In my course, I'll teach you the pyramid principle, a technique for connecting your own bottom-up insights with the top down strategy of your company, customers, or clients.

We also work with companies helping them to get better at this kind of communication throughout the business.