The Strategist's Brain

and the tasks that make it tick

Once in awhile you'll breeze through a used bookstore and find a gem. Worth much more than the pennies you put down to pay for the book.

I came across this dusty little paperback titled "Brains," written (and drawn) in 1987 by Peter Kagel. It's a simple concept. Kagel drew outlines of brains. Then, depending on the profession (i.e., bartenders, baseball players, contractors, etc.) he would divvy up the mind into the key tasks associated. It's mostly a joke. For example, according to his mapping, a doctor's left brain is divided into two parts, one for "arrogance" and one for "greed."

But there are little flashes of honesty in the bin alongside the laughs. When listing out the characteristics that define an "executive's brain," he includes "market share," "acquire latest electronic gadgets," and "CYA memos," all of which would be recognizable in today's herd of CEOs even though the book was written well over three decades ago.

As jokey as the "general's brain" gets, with entries like "spit shine" and "ramrod posture even when sleeping" - it's also telling. "Distrust of other services" may be a little less of a problem today compared to the late-eighties, but it's still a problem. Or "prospective job with defense contractor." If anything that's gone up from then.

I wondered what it would look like to take a real poke at what the modern strategist's brain might look like. How might we divide it up into the tasks associated with the practice of modern strategy.

Modern strategy takes place in organizational headquarters'. If you want to achieve something of substance it is done by, with, and through organizations. That means offices, computers, and all the trimmings and trappings of knowledge work-life.

The exact percentages are impossible to pin down, but roughly half a strategist's brain is consumed with managing the office and others. The other half is the tasks we might call strategic thinking.

Binned that way, the office management portion includes: emails to delete, emails to respond to, bureaucracy, meetings, and basic office politics. Some might use other terms. For example, it may be that a "meeting" could fall under "bureaucracy." Yet the broader point remains. We spend a big bulk of energy maintaining the infrastructure of the office. That's not a knock. That infrastructure is what enables big organizations to do big things. But it does take work, and, actually, it may take the majority of our time and effort and energy.

What residual that remains is the principal value a strategist provides an organization. Strategic thinking.

And that strategic thinking can be broken down into four parts (which I've written about before): scanning for ideas, scrutinizing which ones to pursue, selecting an option for action, and then scoring feedback for future improvement.

The final task I've chosen to pack into the strategist's brain is “writing.” This matters, matters because we're a written culture, both formal and informal, and only by mastering the written word are our ideas able to punch out into the wider world.

For those hoping I would inject some more jokes into the strategist's brain, feel free to suggest what I might have included in the comments below.

How about "abject fear of being 'disrupted?"

"Inappropriate obsession with a business lesson inapplicable to military scenarios" or vice versa?

Or maybe a "worship Bezos/Kissinger/Clausewitz/Sun Tzu/Boyd?"