What if you could translate your vision into measurable impactâregardless of your title, role, or thinking style?
You see exactly how things could be better. You have the insights to drive meaningful change. But turning those ideas into reality? Thatâs where things get stuck.
For too long, strategy has been treated as the domain of executives and consultants, leaving the rest of us wondering why our ideas donât gain traction. You Are a Strategist changes that paradigm, offering a practical playbook for anyone ready to transform clear vision into undeniable impact.
This guide provides straightforward tools to create a one-page Connected Strategic Framework, develop No-BS Objectives and Key Results that measure what actually matters, build alignment without endless meetings or workplace politics, and establish rhythms that turn strategic thinking into real progress.
Whether youâre a leader transforming your teamâs approach, a professional struggling to implement solutions, or an individual contributor wanting to make a bigger impact, this book gives you the frameworks to succeed.
Stop wondering whatâs âwrongâ with you when your ideas donât get traction. A few new tools will help you get big things done.
What if you could translate your vision into measurable impactâregardless of your title, role, or thinking style?
You see exactly how things could be better. You have the insights to drive meaningful change. But turning those ideas into reality? Thatâs where things get stuck.
For too long, strategy has been treated as the domain of executives and consultants, leaving the rest of us wondering why our ideas donât gain traction. You Are a Strategist changes that paradigm, offering a practical playbook for anyone ready to transform clear vision into undeniable impact.
This guide provides straightforward tools to create a one-page Connected Strategic Framework, develop No-BS Objectives and Key Results that measure what actually matters, build alignment without endless meetings or workplace politics, and establish rhythms that turn strategic thinking into real progress.
Whether youâre a leader transforming your teamâs approach, a professional struggling to implement solutions, or an individual contributor wanting to make a bigger impact, this book gives you the frameworks to succeed.
Stop wondering whatâs âwrongâ with you when your ideas donât get traction. A few new tools will help you get big things done.
Think of yourself and those who work for you. How would you all answer these questions?
¡ Is it important to you [them] for your [their] work to have purpose?
¡ Are you [they] curious, sometimes to a fault?
¡ Do you [they] tend to challenge the status quo, in big or little ways?
¡ Do you [they] intuitively make connections that other people donât?
¡ Are you [they] comfortable with the risks of intentional experimentation?
If you lead people who would say yes to these questions, you may recognize them as some of your most challenging reports: high potential, perhaps, and also hard to manage.
If you yourself are saying yes to the questions, this could explain why you might be experiencing challenges in your career, especially with authority figures. You may have left jobs (or even been fired) because of a mismatch between your leadership or organizational culture and what you need to feel engaged, empowered, and successful.
You may also have been brought into roles with the promise of innovation and transformation, only to find the organization doesnât really have the appetite, stomach, or culture to make it happen. You may begin each role excited, highly motivated, and sure that this time will be different, only to end disillusioned, disappointed, and wondering what you did wrong.
Whatâs running through your head, right now, after reading that?
If youâre a leader who is thinking, âHow could anyone live like that?â then Iâm really glad youâre here. A significant percentage of the people you lead or work with live exactly like that and need your understanding and support to do their best work. These pages will give you a set of tools to maximize the folks described above as powerful agents of growth, innovation, and transformational change for your organizationâif you have the stomach for it.
On the other hand, if youâre one of the many people thinking: âI thought it was just me!â then I am here to tell you: it is not just you. We are everywhere.
The list of questions above encapsulates my own early career experience. I now hear these concepts echoed day in and day out, over and over, from those in my courses and workshops and those I work with as a strategy coach.
HOW DO I KNOW YOUâRE A STRATEGIST?
The profession of strategy is a funny one. Very few people decide: âI want to be a strategist when I grow upâ; and aside from Mad Men itâs not like there are many role models in the space. (And while Mad Men is an eerily accurate depiction of agency lifeâin any eraâitâs not exactly the model I want to perpetuate.) So letâs talk for a minute about what being a strategist is not.
First, strategy is not being âsmart.â For too long, leaders and workplaces have conflated âstrategicâ and âsmart.â Thanks to Rob Estreitinho, the founder and head of strategy at Salmon Labs and one of my favorite sources on modern strategic thought, we now have this important clarification: âThe job isnât to convince people that youâre a smart person, itâs to clarify situations so everyone can do the smart thing.â
Second, having a strategist job title is not being a strategist. In my 30+ year career, I have held and hired for numerous roles with âstrategistâ in the name that were purely executional (and where strategic thinking was wholly unwelcome). So just having a âstrategistâ job title does not make you a strategist.
Being a strategist is completely separate from your job title or industry. You may be a strategist who works as a dishwasher, playing word games in your brain while you wash dishes. You may be a strategist who teaches elementary school, observing your students and adapting your teaching approaches based on the data you take in about each kid and how they learn. And yes, you may be a strategist who sits in a chair in an office with the title Chief Strategy Officer on the nameplate outside the door, for sure.
Here, Iâm democratizing the role of strategist.
You are a strategist if you gather facts and observations about the world around you and use them to fuel insights. An insight is a truth that resonates with a person (or group of people), and sparks them to think differently or take some kind of action.
You may have come pre-programmed with a cognitive style that does this naturally. If you read books and research papers for fun and delight in spotting ways that wildly disparate information connects to create a new idea or approach, this might be you.
If you came pre-programmed with a strategist brain, thatâs only part of the puzzle. Now, you have to learn how to communicate those unique insights in ways that other people who are not wired the way you are can understand and engage with. To recruit others to your causes, you must somehow help them understand how you connected the dots (which can be harder than it sounds).
If youâre thinking you did not come pre-programmed with a strategist brain, I hope this book provides a set of tools and practices to help you poke around inside yourself and meet and unblock your own inner strategist. Because if you think back to an earlier point in your lifeâbefore school and society conditioned it out of youâyou probably had a chapter where you were curious and questioning like it was your job. That little you, asking âwhy?â so many times that your parent finally snapped back âbecause I said so!â and then slammed the door on the conversation is still inside of you. And that âlittle youâ is who this book is for.
Any person can wield the tools coached here to enable their inner strategist to speak up for change with a higher likelihood of success when thatâs whatâs called for. The strategist in me recognizes the strategist in you.
Now that we agree that you are a strategist, this book is designed especially for you, to enable you to communicate the insights from your beautiful brain in ways others can rally behind. Because if youâre going to change the world as only you can, the odds are low that you can do i
The folks who relate to the five questions at the start of the introduction are traditionally critical behind-the-scenes players, playing a large role in the actual getting-stuff-done of many organizations. Someone has to dive into the details to do the research; make the plans; design the products; spot and predict which issues might turn into a crisis, and figure out how to mitigate them; and calmly and thoughtfully move through the crises that do happen, while running all the possible scenarios and making the best decisions they can with the information they have.
A lot of this work has been invisible. In fact, in the field of advertising, to say about a piece of creative that âthe strategy is showingâ means someone didnât do their job. âGood strategyâ makes the work better, but you donât see the strategy itself.
The strategy is the scaffolding that the stuff you ultimately see rests on. The strategy is created, and then the visible work begins.
THE ROLE OF IDEAS
In the corporate environment, ideas often get all the glory. Big, shiny, new thinking can be the right tool for the job, especially when there are work challenges for which it makes sense to gather together and âideateââto develop and build out an idea through something like improvâa âyes, andâ process of exploration and joint creation and collaboratively building alignment that is more imaginative than logical. The team creates and iterates together until they arrive at a finished product. The decisionmaker gives their feedback, changes are incorporated, and the work is produced and published.
But each idea is a gamble: you might win big, or you might lose big. Often the methods for evaluating and testing ideas are largely subjective: âDo I like this idea?â âDo you think this idea will work?â âWhat does the focus group say?â âDo we have the right focus group?â and on, and on. In a business environment where people and organizations are doing more with less, with the need to build nimble, adaptable organizations to keep up with a world changing faster than any of us can keep track of, having the best idea is not enough. Itâs hard to ignore the role that power and privilege play in the subjective assessment of ideas: when ideas are made the hero, opportunity, rewards, and recognition are still not equally accessible to everyone.
Increasingly, itâs the folks who relate to the earlier five questions who are stepping out from the shadows and into the spotlight if anyone is to have any hope of solving the major organizational, cultural, and existential problems everyone faces. Today, insightful, curious, âlinkyâ brains are an asset.
Today, leaders and individuals alike must be able to show their workâto strategize a path that establishes processes and goals to make those ideas a reality.
UNBLOCK YOUR INNER STRATEGIST
If you are a CEO responsible for delivering specific performance to a board or the market, you cannot afford the risk of making important decisions about your product, service, or
business based on ideas alone. You, my friend, must do your homework. You must be able to trace your ideas back to data that is reasonable, logical, and can be understood by others.
If you are a business leader, you may sit six levels or more from the person implementing your businessâs core work. You need a way to facilitate collaboration and performance through communicating clear expectations, with enough context to enable people you may never even sit in the same room with to deliver on your vision without them having to be psychic.
If you are an implementer, you may be responsible for delivering empirically measurable results that have never been communicated to you as clear expectations. You can âwing it,â doing your best to mind-read and follow the direction youâre given by your leaders, or you can take the steering wheel and accept responsibility for your own measurable contributions to the organizationâs strategy.
If you are self-employed or pursuing a big vision of your own in any area of your life, youâll exhaust yourself by running with every idea that comes to mind; in entrepreneurial and visionary brains, ideas are like balls coming at you from a pitching machine without a regulator, flying at you so fast you canât even manage to swing at every one. You need some way to corral your big ideas and possibilities down to a workable direction, an aligned set of expectations, and a plan.
These are the skills youâll learn here.
Youâll learn how to create your vision and identify objective metrics that indicate progress toward that vision. You will learn how to think bigâhow to develop insights based on strategic inputs, facts, and observations that pinpoint how you and your organization can do better.
Few, if any, strategists or strategic leaders come pre-programmed with these skills and competencies. Learning this straightforward toolkitâincluding a simple, usable Connected Strategic One-Sheet and No-BS Objectives and Key Resultsâwill get where you want to go.
If you arenât yet a leader in strategic development, the practices youâll learn here will arm you to operate more strategically; to make better choices so your time is focused on outcomes, not activity; and to ask and answer important questions enabling your team to align with your vision.
¡ What impacts or results are most important to achieve?
¡ Why do they matter?
¡ Why do they matter now?
¡ What might be possible to achieve?
¡ What could it mean to succeed wildly?
¡ How will you know, empirically, that youâre making progress?
¡ What have you learned, or what are you learning?
Youâll build your strategic skillset based on iteratively answering important questions like the above, which yield greater clarity, focus, alignment (and less unhealthy conflict and wasted time, energy, and frustration) for everyone involved.
That is how you unblock your inner strategist.
Thereâs a reason this book is called You Are a Strategist, not âAre You a Strategist?â
In todayâs market and work world, every person can operate strategicallyâno matter how senior or tactical your role.
STRATEGY IS CLEAR EXPECTATIONS
Companies spend millions of dollars every year on in-house labor and consulting services on elegant, lengthy, smart strategy decks, only to have them promptly saved to a file-sharing site where they are rarely ever openedâuntil the company begins the process all over again in one, or three, or five years.
The company might then spend countless hours and dollars on project management systems and operational consulting in their efforts to become more âagileâ and to increase their effectiveness. They might spend days in offsites and more dollars on HR consultants to learn how to improve their culture and impact, but somehow when they get back to the office the momentum evaporates and itâs business as usual. Those well-intentioned project plans generate a lot of activity and output but may never yield the strategic outcomes the organization needs.
How do I know?
I spent the first act of my strategy career working for companies that fit that description (sometimes being part of the problem myself).
My colleagues and I were the ones crafting those compelling stories, building those beautiful decks, then working with our collaborators to deliver the work itself.
Almost every time, though, we were missing a critical piece of the puzzle: clear, objective alignment with the client on what success actually meant.
Sometimes that became apparent at the beginning. Weâd gather for our kick-off and find out that the clientâs real world was significantly different than theyâd told us during discovery. The work weâd pitched and won looked nothing like the work they expected us to do.
Sometimes weâd have a little honeymoon of alignment, then during implementation weâd become mired in round after round of review with increasingly unhappy and frustrated clients whose unspoken or unclear expectations were not being met.
Sometimes weâd get all the way through the creation to launching the work. Weâd pat ourselves on the back for a job well done that would make a beautiful case study for our portfolio and win industry awardsâand the client would let us know they were dissatisfied because the work didnât achieve the outcomes they imagined (but never clearly communicated).
My motivation and confidence dipped with each passing day whenever there wasnât an agreed, empirical measuring stick for our work together. The more this happened, the more I felt there had to be a better way.
Well, I was right. Over years of exploration, study, experimentation, and trial and error, Iâve developed that better way. And, as of 2024, itâs worked with client organizations that have a combined annual economic impact of over $15 billion in revenueâalong with an additional 300+ organizations implementing some elements of this approach based on my trainings and workshops and counting.
The better way explained in these pagesâthe Connected Strategic One-Sheet and No-BS OKRs processâenables changemakers like you to pave a clear path to impact. Unlike other approaches that can take weeks or months to implement, my workshop participants routinely complete the exercises in this book from start to finish over the course of four to six hours during a one- to two-week period.
Thatâs right. In two weeks or less, you can lay the foundation for increased strategic impactâand career satisfaction and fulfillment while youâre at it. Youâre about to become the strategist your organization and career has always needed.
These pages contain two big shifts that you need to know:
1. How to create a single-page connected strategy that distills your organizational strategy down to one usable page.
2. How to fill gaps in your strategic vision by implementing a coherent alignment layer to benefit your organization.
The first shift means creating a Connected Strategic One-Sheet, the tool I started using with clients to make their organizational strategy actually useful on a day-to-day basis. The second shift includes a specific, new approach to the widespread methodology known as Objectives and Key Resultsâthe new approach I call No-BS OKRs.
***
¡ No-BS OKRs: A straightforward, simple approach to creating and achieving objectives and key results (OKRs). No-BS OKRs have two parts: 1) clear, visionary, directional objectives, and 2) empirically2 measurable key resultsâprogress and outcome targets that align on what success means and reveal whether youâre on or off track.
***
No-BS OKRs transform innovation-driven environments where performance hinges on improving human experiences, not just making numbers âlook good.â
When you put into practice what you learn here, youâll clear the path for impact by yourself and your collaborators. Youâll be able to:
¡ Empower change. Skip the chaos and dive straight into effective, impactful goal setting.
¡ Boost innovation. Foster a culture that values experimentation, creative solutions, and learning.
¡ Quantify success. Communicate expectations and measure impact far beyond the business metrics youâre aware of today.
This book is your invitation into an innovative, rewarding, often misunderstood, and highly gate-kept area of business: the world of organizational strategy.
STRATEGY IS YOUR GOALS
If youâre already a professional strategist, you may be scratching your head about why this book is so focused on goals when goal setting is not always part of a strategistâs remit. The explanation is: motivation science.
During my career as a creative agency strategist, every pitch I worked on started with goal setting. A lengthy discussion would then yield the same two goals: (1) win the work; and (2) do work that would get the client promoted.
The problem was, even doing our very best work, our influence on those two goals was unbearably low. An agency can win the work in the room and lose it due to red tape in the procurement process; there are countless factors unrelated to our work that go into our clientâs performance evaluation. Those goals didnât give us clarity about what was important with this particular pitch or alignment on our purpose with this particular work.
I found myself in a deep, demotivated burnout. I loved my work, but the profound subjectivity was incompatible with my brain chemistry.
I started to wonder: What if we identified some other goals? What if we identified some selfish goals that mattered to us as professionals, that got us excited and motivated? So that even if we lost the work for some reason beyond our control, we still had a chance at satisfaction on our own self-motivated goalâover which we may have a bit more influence?
So I tried it.
Working in line with those early experimental self-set goals, I started to feel a strange new sense of confidence and self-esteem. My engagement with my work rebounded. My frustration diminished. And my collaboration with colleagues and leaders became less stressful and more clear.
At the time, I didnât know what was happening. I just knew that the more I focused on self-set, quantifiable goals, the happier I was at work.
Fast forward nearly a decade, and nowâafter years of specialty work in goal setting, operationalizing for goal attainment, and professional training in the art and science of human behavior changeâit all makes sense.
Now, I know that those early spontaneous experiments were consistent with decades of motivation science on goal setting and human behavior change. And strategy achievement, at its core, is human behavior change.
Psychological research in the motivation sciences fields shows that human behavior change relies heavily on the creation of specific, actionable goals and a learning-focused approach. In this book, youâre going to learn my methods for creating goals that increase learning, problem-solving, self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, engagement, duration of goal pursuit, and other benefits that ultimately lead to higher performance.
Iâm a firm believer in the power of the practices in this book not just to set goals but to transform the very mechanisms by which youâll achieve them, no matter your industry, your organization size, or your stage of career.
STRATEGY IS NONLINEAR, AND SO IS THIS BOOK
This book is divided into three parts, providing a fully-connected, complete toolkit for creating and achieving important strategic goals.
1. Strategic Direction
2. Strategic Alignment
3. Strategy Achievement
Part 1 is about establishing direction. Having clear vision and direction to follow is important both to increase your chances of success and, also, to enable you to bring others along on the journey with you effectively.
Part 2âand this is where objectives and key results come inâshows that to achieve maximum on your strategic vision, you need visibility into the facts of your progress and achievement. You need a solid dashboard; not one that âlooks good,â but one based on facts and honesty since you can only do better if you have data on where you are right now. Objectives and key results (OKRs) and the other practices in this part fill in gaps in your current planning model with critical tactics about your progress, successes, and failures.
Finally, in Part 3, youâll find a resource guide with wide-ranging topics to architect the behavior and operating changes necessary to achieve your strategy. This section is âchoose your own adventure,â since each reader will be in a different environment and stage. Read what applies to you, skip what doesnât, and come back to it as a reference as your career evolves.
Iâve made every effort to create a book here designed to be useful for linear and non-linear thinkers alike. This book can be read start to finish, each chapter building on the previous. But you can also pick and choose which sections are of interest to you and skip any sections that donât apply for now and come back to them later.
Once youâve finished working your way through this book, youâll have had the opportunity to practice with the frameworks and practices I use working with enterprises from the Fortune 100 to solopreneurs. These tools allow organizations to increase impact, to stop wasting valuable human labor, and to achieve higher rates of human engagementâemployee engagement or your own personal career satisfaction and engagement. These same practices can indeed be applied personally, so you can envision and build the life you want to lead.
While youâre at it, youâll learn (by doing) a number of important practices, skills, and mindset shifts that will make the most of that big, beautiful brain of yoursâyour curiosity, creativity, intrinsic motivation, and experimentationânot to mention confidence-building step-by-step exercises and practices that reduce the cognitive overhead of creating strategic deliverables. Itâs all fuel for your strategic brain.
Speaking of exercises . . .
If you are a worksheet person, this book has a companion: The No-BS OKRs Workbook. The workbook includes quick versions of basic No-BS OKRs words and meanings and fourteen worksheets, with expanded instructions for the exercises mentioned in this book. The No-BS OKRs Workbook is available both as a downloadable PDF or as a print book. The downloadable PDF version is available at findrc.co/pdfworkbook, and the print book information is at youareastrategist.com.
TL^DR: STRATEGIST TAKEAWAYS
This book explains:
¡ How to distill your strategy down to a single page to hold yourself to achieving whatâs most important.
¡ How No-BS OKRsâthe specific implementation approach I created and work withâcan improve your leadership and career effectiveness.
¡ How to create clear, focused, aligned OKRs for your team and yourself.
¡ Advanced skills for the big thinker.
By learning the above skills, youâll become better acquainted with your own inner strategist and be ready to lead (from the back or any other chair in the office) in todayâs ever-changing business world. If you follow the pattern my clients do, youâll do so while increasing employee engagement, your own career impact, and your own career fulfillment.
Organizations work more effectively when team members understand strategic goals and their roles in achieving them. Sara Lobkovich's You Are a Strategist presents a practical approach to Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) that is accessible to anyone, regardless of tenure or position. Lobkovich positions OKRs as essential for driving clarity, alignment, and measurable progress, emphasizing behavior change, intrinsic motivation, and collaboration. The book provides actionable exercises, examples, and insights to help leaders create effective OKRs, track progress, and foster transparency.
What distinguishes this book from other OKR titles is Lobkovich's acknowledgment of unique challenges faced by marginalized individualsâintroverted, neurodivergent, queer, and historically marginalized people who feel like "square pegs" in traditional workplaces. She recognizes how marginalized individuals are often misunderstood, undervalued, or dismissed professionally, while emphasizing that they possess unique perspectives, creativity, and insights that drive innovation.
Throughout the book, Lobkovich encourages marginalized individuals to embrace their "inner strategist" and leverage their strengths, such as curiosity, intrinsic motivation, and the ability to see connections others may miss. From my vantage point as a diversity and inclusion professional, I appreciate Lobkovichâs challenge to stop waiting for external validation and instead focus on bringing their value directly to their work. In my experience, this is a critical lesson for anyone with a marginalized identity in dominant-culture spaces: the hesitation to take up space, to be seen and heard.
Lobkovich writes in an engaging, straightforward way, emphasizing essential truths for corporate success: the importance of clear expectations, alignment, and measurable outcomes. âFor readers ready to take the next step in their professional advancement, the book provides tools and frameworks, such as the âNo-BS OKRsâ methodology, to help communicate ideas effectively, align goals with organizational priorities, and demonstrate meaningful impact.
For team managers, there are important takeaways about the challenges of implementing new methodologies, such as resistance to change and a preference for familiar routines. Teams can overcome implementation challenges by fostering a culture of transparency, aligning goals to organizational priorities, and clearly defining expectations. âLobkovich encourages leaders to model desired behaviors, support collaboration, and focus on outcomes rather than activities to drive meaningful progress. â
The book successfully combines practical OKR methodology with inclusive leadership principles, making it valuable for both individual contributors seeking to demonstrate strategic thinking and managers building effective, diverse teams.