The Strategic Formula: A New System for Business Strategy in the AI Age

Every executive believes they have a strategy. But when you ask them to write it down — in a single statement specific enough that a new executive could read it and know exactly what the company is and isn't doing — something surprising happens. They write completely different answers. One leader describes a business model. Another describes a competitive advantage. A third describes the five-year plan. The same words. Different meanings. When they aren't aligned on what the strategy actually is, resource allocation, technology investments, and strategic priorities pull in different directions without anyone realizing why.

The Strategic Formula solves this problem by giving leadership teams a shared vocabulary and a diagnostic system that turns strategy from a direction into a testable formula.

What You'll Be Able to Do Leave your next strategy session with a single statement — precise enough that any executive on your team could read it and know exactly what the company is and isn't doing, and specific enough to test against every major decision that follows.

Know, with structural precision, whether your business is genuinely protected — or whether what you've been calling a competitive advantage is simply better execution you'd have to sustain indefinitely.

Translate that formula into specific executional priorities — the Critical Success Factors tied to each element reveal exactly where effort, investment, and coordination must concentrate given your specific combination.

Run strategy conversations where the team interrogates structure rather than defends positions — because when everyone uses the same words to mean the same things, the conversation shifts from political to analytical.

Know exactly where AI will press on your strategy first — and where you're structurally protected. The threat isn't evenly distributed across industries; it's distributed across structures.

Find out whether your data strategy is actually compounding — or whether you're running a data project that looks like a learning loop but isn't, and what structural condition is missing.

The System The foundation is the Periodic Table of Business Strategy: 35 elements organized into 12 business models, 6 competitive advantages, and 17 strategies. These elements give any leadership team a structured, consistent way to name exactly how their business competes.

The Strategic Formula combines them into a single statement: (Business Model + Strategy) × Competitive Advantage. The multiplication is intentional. Competitive advantage is the multiplier. Without it, results depend entirely on execution. You're running hard, but nothing is compounding in your favor.

Why Now The frameworks leaders learned — Porter's Five Forces, the Business Model Canvas, 7 Powers — were built for different competitive eras. They're not wrong. But they're incomplete for a world where AI can compress cost structures in months and collapse information asymmetries almost overnight. The Strategic Formula was designed for this environment — developed and tested in real strategic work since 2016, not assembled in response to the AI moment. It is the natural companion to Business Model Generation — adding the moat and the move to the canvas — and the AI-native complement to 7 Powers.

Built for Practitioners This is not a theory book. It is a practitioner toolkit designed for immediate use. 62 diagrams. 14 tables. A visual reference built for offsites, board decks, and consulting engagements — ready to use without setup.

The Critical Success Factors built into each element translate the diagnostic into executional priorities. The book gives you the diagnostic and the brief. Execution is yours.

Strategy is a formula you can write down. AI disruption is a test that formula will face. This book gives you both.