Your Strategic Planning Toolkit for Next Year

The hol­i­days offer a rare moment to pause, reflect, and ensure you have a win­ning strate­gic plan ready for the year ahead.

To help you pre­pare, we’ve round­ed up our top 10 arti­cles on strate­gic plan­ning and growth strat­e­gy from the past year. These are the insights lead­ers relied on most to sharp­en their vision and execution.

Want to dig deeper?

If you want to mas­ter the under­ly­ing dynam­ics of your busi­ness, check out my new book, The 4 Forces of Growth.

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Here’s to a year of growth.

1. Why Your Com­pa­ny Isn’t Growing

Growth stalls for pre­dictable rea­sons — and none of them are mys­te­ri­ous. This post breaks down the real root caus­es behind stag­na­tion, from unclear strat­e­gy to inter­nal capac­i­ty issues. The big take­away? If you’re stuck, it’s almost always because your busi­ness is per­fect­ly designed to get the results you’re get­ting. When lead­ers accept that truth, change becomes possible.

2. The Most Dan­ger­ous Place for a Com­pa­ny to Get Stuck

This is the zone where com­pa­nies have too much suc­cess to feel urgent… but too many issues to sus­tain momen­tum. It’s the slow decline dis­guised as sta­bil­i­ty. This blog helps lead­ers spot the sub­tle warn­ing signs — and take action before the busi­ness drifts into irrelevance.

3. CEO Mas­tery: Cap­i­tal & Resource Allocation

One of the CEO’s most strate­gic levers is how they deploy time, mon­ey, and tal­ent. Most under-allo­cate, over-allo­cate, or sim­ply avoid the tough calls. This piece explores how great CEOs think about cap­i­tal — not reac­tive­ly, but delib­er­ate­ly. It teach­es you to place few­er, big­ger bets and ensure your resources match your true priorities.

4. Mar­ket-Dri­ven vs. Man­age­ment-Dri­ven Growth

High-per­form­ing com­pa­nies grow because the mar­ket pulls them for­ward, not because man­age­ment push­es hard­er. This post forces you to ask the uncom­fort­able ques­tion: Are we engi­neered for demand-dri­ven growth, or are we muscling our way to results? The dis­tinc­tion mat­ters — and deter­mines whether growth is scal­able or exhausting.

5. 10 Years After Scal­ing Up: What We’ve Learned

A decade after the glob­al impact of Scal­ing Up, we revis­it­ed the frame­works, the pat­terns, and the lessons. What’s still uni­ver­sal­ly true? What needs to evolve? This blog cap­tures the biggest insights from thou­sands of coach­ing hours — includ­ing why sim­plic­i­ty wins, align­ment beats inten­si­ty, and why strat­e­gy must be refreshed far more often than most lead­ers think.

6. Learn­ing One Big Thing

Each year, I ask lead­ers to choose one big thing they’ll learn that will mate­ri­al­ly shift their company’s tra­jec­to­ry. Not 10 things. Not 40 books. One. This arti­cle rein­forces the dis­ci­pline of focused learn­ing — the kind that mean­ing­ful­ly upgrades your lead­er­ship, not just your infor­ma­tion intake.

7. KPIs That Dri­ve Growth

Lots of com­pa­nies track too many met­rics. Very few track the ones that actu­al­ly mat­ter. This post out­lines the KPIs that cre­ate clar­i­ty, improve deci­sion-mak­ing, and dri­ve pre­dictabil­i­ty. The mes­sage is sim­ple: bet­ter met­rics cre­ate bet­ter con­ver­sa­tions, which cre­ate bet­ter deci­sions. If your KPIs don’t pro­voke action, they’re noise.

8. The Shared Expe­ri­ence of Scal­ing Up

There’s com­fort — and pow­er — in know­ing the chal­lenges you face aren’t unique. This blog high­lights the com­mon strug­gles lead­ers expe­ri­ence on the scal­ing jour­ney: pres­sure, com­plex­i­ty, peo­ple issues, deci­sion fatigue. When lead­ers under­stand these as nor­mal, not per­son­al fail­ures, they gain con­fi­dence and resilience to keep push­ing forward.

9. 4 Fix­es to Strate­gic Mistakes

Every strate­gic plan has blind spots. This post iden­ti­fies the four most com­mon strate­gic errors — lack of focus, weak dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion, inter­nal mis­align­ment, and fan­ta­sy fore­cast­ing — and offers sim­ple, prac­ti­cal fix­es. It’s a reminder that great strat­e­gy is rarely about bril­liance; it’s about remov­ing the noise and strength­en­ing the basics.

10. Lessons From the Frontlines

Real-world lead­er­ship isn’t the­o­ret­i­cal — it’s messy, urgent, and deeply human. This blog shares what we’ve learned from work­ing shoul­der-to-shoul­der with CEOs and teams in the trench­es: the impor­tance of can­dor, the inevitabil­i­ty of resis­tance, the dis­ci­pline of slow­ing down to think, and the courage to make deci­sions that feel uncom­fort­able but necessary.

If you’d like sup­port review­ing your growth strat­e­gy or exe­cut­ing against it, let us know.