This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

75 tools for a chief strategy officer in one short course: 56 ready-to-use templates, checklists, procedures, question lists and AI prompts, 16 downloadable tool files and 3 models.

Open a lecture, take the file, fill it in for your company.

Why strategy stays on paper

Strategy was just added to your job. The team, the analysts and the consulting budget were not. The CEO still expects a strategy the company will follow, and a board that will approve it. Ask the CEO, the CFO and the sales lead where the money comes from, and you get three different answers. Ask four managers how many initiatives are running, and you get four different counts. A paid market report gives you a number you cannot defend in the room, a big deck gets nobody to decide, and every month the budget keeps funding last year's projects.

What changes after this course

You run strategy as a working system and not as an annual document. You know where the profit is and how much of the growth was simply the market. You size the market bottom-up and can show the source behind every number. The strategy fits on one page and says what the company will not do. Initiatives have a score, a true cost and a threshold for stopping. Every goal has an owner, a number and a date. And the board gets a pack with answers to the questions it will ask.

What is inside: 75 tools, counted lecture by lecture

You do not have to take this number on trust. Open any lecture and read its description: every tool inside is listed there by name.

• 56 ready-to-use tools inside the presentations:
• 22 templates and sample documents: strategy one-pager, guiding policy statement template, initiative portfolio sheet, strategy board presentation
• 11 checklists: bad strategy, fully loaded CAC, broken strategy cascade, strategy review
• 8 step-by-step procedures: five-step strategic choice process, profit pool analysis, strategy cascade workshop, market research evidence verification
• 8 question lists and scripts: CEO strategy discovery questions, strategy board question bank, strategic refusal scripts, twenty-minute strategy presentation script
• 4 ready AI prompts: market map research, competitor pricing comparison, customer switching research, competitor entry risk
• 3 formulas, metric sets and scorecards: Rule of 40, strategic diagnosis metric set, weighted initiative prioritization scorecard
• 16 downloadable tool files, two for every lecture: Decision log, 90-day plan, Profit pool worksheet, Diagnosis one-pager, Research prompts, Evidence pack, Strategy on one page, Option worksheet, Initiative portfolio, Gate card, Cascade workshop kit, Cascade map, Strategy calendar, Review run sheet, Board question drill and Board pack
• 3 models explained with examples: adviser, referee and builder roles of a CSO, top-down market sizing, and the company, function and team strategy cascade

Where the tools are

• The CSO role and the first 90 days (11 tools).
• Strategic analysis: diagnosis in numbers, market and competitors (2 lectures, 21 tools).
• Strategy formulation: the strategic choice and the initiative portfolio (2 lectures, 18 tools).
• Strategy execution: cascade, review and the strategy office (2 lectures, 18 tools).
• Strategy communication: board and company (8 tools).

Who is teaching

I am Mike, the #1 HR instructor on Udemy, with 1,800,000+ course enrollments from 170,000 students, and the author of about 200 books on Amazon. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn and worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank across 20 years in HR. I hold PHRi, SHRM-CP and HCI sHRBP certifications and represent HRCI in Eastern Europe. I am also a founder and lead the strategy of my own academy.

I have built strategy from inside a company. At Wargaming we went off-site every year to plan the HR strategy, a strategy session for the HR team. Before the trip each of us talked to the business leaders, learned their needs and goals and studied the plans of our units and the strategy of the company. Then we left the city for two days. On the first day we analyzed what we had: surveys, problems, a SWOT. On the second day we discussed where we wanted to arrive and finalized it. More than a hundred people worked in HR, and up to fifteen went off-site. The preparation before the room decided the result, and this course gives you that preparation as files.

How to use the course

Go through the eight lectures in order: each one gives you two files to fill in, and together they make the strategy package. It takes six hours. Section and lecture titles show how many tools are inside, and each lecture description lists them by name.

What is included

• 8 lectures across 5 sections, 6 hours
• 24 downloadable resources: 16 tool files and the lecture presentations
• 75 tools across the lessons, ready to copy into your own work
• Lifetime access to all materials
• Active instructor support in the Q&A section
• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

Where to start

Open the first lecture, download the 90-day plan and the decision log, and write down the first three decisions the company expects from strategy this quarter. Enrol now and start your first lesson today.