Strategy OS: Implement an Advanced Business Operating System in Six Simple Steps

Entrepreneur Tools, Book 3

By: Steve Preda

Narrated by: Adam Riley

You are an ambitious entrepreneur or CEO who wants to build a successful company—and not just a small lifestyle business that will allow you and your family to live comfortably.

You want to create something that will be bigger than anything on your city’s Fast Fifty list. You’re aiming for the Inc. 5000, and possibly even the Fortune 500.

In some respects, you are already on your way. You discovered and implemented a robust business operating system, such as the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), Scaling Up, OKRs, or Pinnacle.

You already have most of the right people in the right seats, and they are setting and establishing annual and quarterly objectives. Your business has a vision and a mission, and you are making progress toward them.

However, you have hit a ceiling. And your basic business operating system is no longer enough to help you push through. Although you have mastered the tools of these systems, your quarterly meetings are becoming repetitive and boring. You have fallen into a rut.

But, wait! There are higher-level strategy concepts that the iconic companies of our age—Apple, Amazon, Adobe—use. Couldn’t you study these masters and apply what they have done in your own business?

I can tell you that there are a plethora of strategy books out there. However, you’ll find many of them arcane, academic, and even confusing. Most were written a long time ago and use out-of-date examples from well before the tech age. Many are no longer relevant.

Worse, a lot of the concepts are incoherent, and you’d be hard pressed to find any reasonable sequence of implementation. Further, several authors argue that strategy is an art, not a science, and that it is not even possible to build a coherent system for strategy creation. In business parlance, the strategy market is fragmented and ripe for consolidation. Ouch!

Now, what if I told you that these authors are wrong, and that strategy is more of a science than an art? What if these concepts actually could be “toolified” and sequenced, like what EOS did with the methods of small business execution?

For the past five years, I’ve been obsessed by the idea of creating a strategy operating system, and I’ve spent the past 12 months figuring out how to design one.

During that time, I read and reread the most important strategy books of the past half century, including those from Michael Porter, Bruce Henderson, Richard Rumelt, Henry Mintzberg, Jim Collins, and others, and the top strategy articles in the Harvard Business Review.

My goal was to extract and simplify their essential ideas. I then figured out the right sequence for these concepts and illustrated them with simple drawings and fresh examples. I want you, the ambitious entrepreneur, to understand these steps so clearly that you could explain them to your people and implement these concepts in your business.

I have clustered and organized these ideas into six consecutive steps that will enable you, the smart business owner or CEO, to gradually build up a coherent strategy from scratch. Strategy OS can be implemented on top of your existing business operating system, and you can manage it using a digital platform such as Ninety.io.

But I have to warn you, this system can lead you to the peaks of the highest business mountains in the world, but it will be no light trekking. Implementing the strategy operating system requires disciplined thinking, teamwork, and consistent execution.

Are you ready for the business adventure of your lifetime?

©2023 Steve Preda (P)2023 Steve Preda