You want to be guided by a long-term, game-changing strategic plan for your business. It should inform your daily actions and help you reach critical milestones. Together, these will create long-term value, grant you a competitive edge and also be good for the planet. But how do you inspire your colleagues to reach for breakthrough results which transcend rampant short-termism? And how do you discover and use the principles and best practices of long-term strategic planning? Find answers in every episode. For full episodes, subscribe to the paid version of the podcast and newsletter at https://longtermstrategy.info longtermstrategy.substack.com
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August 10, 20261 hr 26 min
Ep 38 - The Bellhop and the Sardines w/Amie Devero
Your company knows that it needs to move quickly once a corporate strategy has been developed, to get the document in the hands of the staff. But what does it mean to “get it into their hands?” Send them a pdf? Get them to watch a video? Attend a town hall? Attend a briefing from their manager, after she has received her briefing? This is a massive problem and here today to apply an AI-driven solution is Amie Devero. Tune into this episode to hear from us as we tackle the issue of strategy activation together. Show Notes You can try Contextuum at www.contextuum.ai Amie and Contextuum will be featured at the Long-Term Strategy Conference 2026. This year’s theme is AI in Strategy Creation | Beyond Trendslop - https://strategyconf.fwconsulting.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe
August 3, 20261 hr 23 min
Ep 37 Why Global Conflict Has Your C-Suite Knee-Jerking Strategy Once Again
Your company prides itself on its long-term thinking, planning and acting. But now that times are difficult due to the outbreak of a war, you are wary of what might happen given your experience of COVID, supply chain breakdowns and sudden tariffs. During these extreme events, you saw C-Suite executives delve into the weeds, doing the work of managers. As their time horizons shortened, they ignored the big picture until well after the crisis passed. This meant lost opportunities, and a lack of preparation for future threats. How should you intervene given that it appears as if the roots of long-term thinking are weaker and shallower than you thought? In this episode we look at your leadership system and where it lacks disciplined practices for long-term focus. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe
June 17, 202621 min
Ep 36 - Why SWOT Isn’t the Problem: How We Use It Is
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com Today, your executive team fills SWOT boxes in 90 minutes and calls it strategy. Tomorrow’s competitive landscape will punish that superficiality mercilessly. Chris Fox predicts the emerging standard: double-barreled insight generation that combines intellectual analysis with visceral pattern recognition. The companies that master this before 2027 will spot their Kodak moments early enough to pivot. The rest will wonder why their strategy sessions produced such weak insights while competitors transformed entire business models. This conversation reveals the magnitude gap that will separate strategic survivors from casualties. Tune in to hear from me and my special guest, Chris Fox, as we tackle and try to solve this wicked problem together. We’ll be putting our heads together to find new ways of discussing strengths, weaknesses opportunities and threats – SWOT – that go beyond the usual thinking. I’m Francis Wade and welcome to the JumpLeap Long-Term Strategy Podcast Chris Fox is a strategy consultant and founder of StratNav, the collaborative platform for business strategy development and execution. With over 26 years’ experience, Chris helps leaders replace guesswork with evidence and execution. He also runs Chris C Fox Consulting, advising C‑suite teams on strategy that delivers Full video available below.
May 18, 20261 hr 3 min
Ep 35 - Your Strategic Stagnation Isn't a Framework Problem—It's a Story Problem
You’re in a strategy retreat. You see an opening to shift the conversation—a strategic insight you know could change the trajectory. You speak up with confidence. And then... blank looks. Awkward silence. The room moves on as if you hadn’t spoken. It doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO, the board chair, or an ambitious director. The frustration is identical: you have strategic clarity, you know the frameworks, yet your interventions land with a thud while others command the room effortlessly. Most executives diagnose this as needing sharper frameworks or better presentation skills. Wrong problem. This episode exposes what elite strategists do differently: they’ve built pattern libraries from accumulated case exposure that allow them to deploy diagnostic stories, pattern stories, and origin stories in the moment—not in PowerPoint decks afterward. You’ll discover why Julius Yego’s YouTube-driven Olympic medal validates cognitive science research on tacit knowledge, how Samuel Berger’s “intellectual dark matter” explains the gap between knowing frameworks and commanding strategic conversations, and why the three-season development model transforms in-the-room impact when executive programs don’t. For global executives who’ve exhausted conventional development paths, this reveals the hidden capability that separates persuasive pattern recognition from forgettable framework recitation—and the deliberate practice method that builds it. Enjoy the full video of this episode below for all subscribers. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe
March 4, 202620 min
Ep 34 How Do Leaders Make Decisions When There's No Time and No Certainty?
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com Your company is bleeding. The tariff just hit. Your board wants answers. You have 48 hours. But sometimes the brutal truth is that the warning signs were there 20-years ago. In this episode, Marcel Melzer stops the scroll with his contrarian claim: strategic decisions should take 48 hours, not months. His “decision as a service” model combines strategic foresight with AI-augmented decision intelligence—delivering what traditional consulting takes 8 weeks to produce, in 2 days. The magic? It’s not about perfect information. It’s about deciding at 80% confidence while your competitors are still scheduling meetings. We deconstruct a fictional case live, revealing why companies confuse firefighting with strategy, why past non-decisions create present disasters, and why the future belongs to leaders who can decide fast under uncertainty. Jamaica just got hurricane-smashed—we need this yesterday. You can view the full video below this line with a paid subscription.
February 10, 20262 min
Strategic Fluency - Frameworks or Stories?
Transcript 00:00:01 Stop me if you’ve been in Bob’s position. Every strategist learns the frameworks. Porto five forces, blue ocean strategy, and SWAT analysis. And we assume great strategy comes from great frameworks. So how Schultz of Starbucks fame, he knew all of the frameworks, but he didn’t transform Starbucks or any of them. In 1983, Schulz visited Milan. He walked into an express bar. He saw the ritual, the community, the third place between home and work. And that experience became a story. That story became his northstar. 00:00:34 That story created a hundred billion dollar plus company. Not a framework, a story. But here’s where most strategists get stuck. Baba spent hours preparing for the strategy retreat. He had the perfect framework from his MBA and he was excited because he was going to nail it by explaining this framework. As the conversation progressed, some doubts crept in, but he prepared for hours. So when the moment came he jumped in and as he explained his framework eyes glazed over. So he tried to speed up 00:01:07 that made it worse. Phones came out people started to read and his boss gave him a dark look that was kind of like a cut it out and Bob gave up. But moments later another colleague jumped in. And in that case, she told a story. And Bob suddenly realized she was explaining the same concept that he just tried to describe using a framework. But this time, the heads were nodding. There were some new insights that were emerging as people built on her initial story. There was some buying happening. She was accomplishing the result. And he 00:01:42 thought to himself, why didn’t I try that? Well, here’s what he discovered and what Howard Schultz knew all along. that we’ve been taught that strategic thinking is about mastering frameworks. They give us the illusion of sophistication. But here’s the truth that plays out in every boardroom and every strategy retreat and every presentation given by consultants that there’s a big difference between strategic thinking and strategic fluency. Strategic thinking is all about those frameworks 00:02:09 that you learned in MBA school, ones I mentioned before. Strategic fluency teaches you stories. So when JFK committed America to go to the moon, he didn’t pull out the Gad chart. He didn’t tell a framework. Instead, he went to the future and told a story about the future. So the best strategists actually aren’t searching for which framework applies in which situation. Instead, they’re reaching out for their curated collection of signature stories. So how do you avoid that awkward moment Bob 00:02:38 found himself in? I recommend that you prepare three signature stories. One transformational stories like the one about Schulz in Milan. One about the future like Kennedy’s moonshot. And one story about strategic choice. That’s three stories. Good news is that Strat Cinema helps you to find your three. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe
February 5, 202649 min
Ep 33 - From Laundry-list, Wishlist or Checklist to a Game-Changing Strategy
Picture two teams in your company, six months apart. The first team is drowning. They have 47 “strategic initiatives” on their list, no clear way to prioritize, and every meeting devolves into debates about resources. Morale is terrible, and nobody can articulate what they’re really trying to accomplish. Fast forward six months: the same team, but now they’re energized, focused, and can explain their strategy in three minutes. Projects that don’t serve their core hypothesis get killed quickly. They’re making contingency plans because they understand their strategy is a bet, not a certainty. What happened in between? They stopped confusing a strategic plan with actual strategy. Today, I want to walk you through that transformation, because the gap between these two states isn’t about working harder—it’s about thinking differently. Tune into this episode to join me in tackling this wicked problem. I’m Francis Wade and welcome to the JumpLeap Long-Term Strategy Podcast Here is a video of the full episode. You can also follow the podcast on YouTube. Show Notes NotebookLM link https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/6e0f6686-25ff-44b8-a629-54df92dbef7c?authuser=1 Link to Fictional Credit Union Case https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/33364888-4e5a-4738-80d1-24f2c42c66cd?authuser=1 Roger Martin’s Video This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe
December 8, 2025Episode 3221 min
Ep 32 - From Idea Overload to Execution - A Strategist's Guide to Prioritization
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com Your organization has 37 brilliant projects. You have bandwidth for maybe 5. Now what? This is the reality facing leaders everywhere: expensive master plans that deliver impressive lists of initiatives but zero guidance on which ones to actually pursue. Meanwhile, your CEO expects magic, your budget is maxed out, and that critical board meeting is in two weeks. Sound familiar? This episode tackles one of strategy’s most brutal challenges: how do you prioritize when everything seems important and resources are painfully limited? Joined by Iwona Wilson, founder of Wilson Business Consulting and expert in opportunity framing, Francis Wade and his guest unpack the story of “Stephanie”—a VP of strategic planning stuck with 37 projects from an expensive master plan and no roadmap for execution. This conversation exposes the hidden traps of poor prioritization and reveals a systematic approach to cutting through the chaos. You’ll discover: * Why “let’s start everything and see what works” destroys value faster than doing nothing * The real cost of scattered execution (spoiler: it’s not just wasted money) * A proven framework for organizing idea overload into executable strategy * How to build decision-driven roadmaps that preserve flexibility while driving focus * The art of strategic sequencing: when to say “not now” to protect “yes” for the right projects The hard truth: Most organizations fail not because they lack good ideas, but because they try to execute too many at once. The companies that win? They master the discipline of strategic prioritization. Stop drowning in possibilities. Start executing with purpose. Here is the video version of the free excerpt. For a limited time, the full video below the paywall will be available on StratCinema.
September 30, 202548 min
Live on Substack #3: Unmasking the Strategy Success Trap
Unmasking the Strategy Success Trap: Why Booms Lead to Busts! How should your company react to amazing success? Join us for a spirited conversation diagnosing the fatal strategic missteps of companies that went through unearned booms during COVID-19. We reveal why giants like Peloton and Fiverr abandoned their profitable, long-term business models to chase massive, temporary demand. We explore how this pursuit of tactical success led to impulsive, nearsighted decisions—such as Peloton becoming a capital-intensive manufacturing/logistics operation—which guaranteed a crash and painful layoffs. Discover the critical difference between “structural change” (permanent) and “cyclical noise” (temporary). Learn the essential discipline of long-term strategy . A sound strategy must act as a risk-management tool during good times, allowing companies like Amazon and Uber to leverage windfalls to build a lasting, sustainable advantage. True success is measured not by the peak of a boom, but by the depth of a normalization the company can survive. Prepare your company for the threat of a disruption brought about by success beyond its wildest dreams. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe
September 29, 202521 min
Ep 31 - Escaping the Short-Term Trap
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com You have a hunger for game-changing results . As a CEO, board member, or strategic planner, you aspire to produce big results. While you know methods that work, you still find yourself drifting back into short-term thinking in these tumultuous days. Without daily activities guiding you toward a True North —a preferred long-term destination—you run the risk of being sucked into the 24-hour news cycle or latest drama. How do you build the strategic muscles necessary to withstand even daily shocks and surprises ? The opposite of conventional strategy is true. Stop chasing short-term survival; outsiders and technology cannot save you from constant disruption. Conventional wisdom demanding “twice the results in half the time” is fundamentally flawed. Real game-changing success requires robust long-term strategic muscle . We expose the 25 fatal obstacles infecting C-suites with short-term thinking, providing definitive ‘obstacle knowledge’ so you can become a robust, different kind of strategist who can preemptively design for disruption . Tune in to join me in tackling this wicked problem. I’ll share the approach we took to designing the Long-Term Strategy Conference 2025 held in June. I’m Francis Wade and welcome to the JumpLeap Long-Term Strategy Podcast. P.S. Here’s a LLM prompt you can copy and paste into an LLM to deepen your understanding: Act as a strategic planning consultant. I just listened to a podcast about long-term strategic planning. Here’s the core insight I learned: “Big results need years. Long time frame and big results go together. If you try to commit to big goals on short time frames, it doesn’t work.” My current strategic planning challenge is: [DESCRIBE IN ONE SENTENCE YOUR BIGGEST STRUGGLE WITH LONG-TERM THINKING IN YOUR ORGANIZATION]. Based on this insight, identify three specific symptoms in my organization that indicate we’re stuck in short-term thinking. Then suggest one concrete conversation starter I can use this week to begin reframing our strategic discussions. P.P.S. Want more? For subscribers, I have generated at least 5 more prompts, available below the paywall. Show Notes https://strategyconf.fwconsulting.com/conference-topics-2025/ - The full list of 25 Obstacles The full video is available below for subscribers. So are the other LLM Prompts mentioned above.
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