A New Approach to Strategy, Leadership, and Organizational Performance in the Age of AI
Dr. Brandon Barnett, Bernhard Ries and Pam Kelley-Dockter
The future belongs to leaders who build organizations that think strategically as a team.
A New Approach to Strategy, Leadership, and Organizational Performance in the Age of AI
With lessons and stories from our years at Intel, our strategy lab
BARNETT · RIES · KELLEY-DOCKTER
THE PROMISE
Most organizations still treat strategy as something a small group of executives creates, with help from consultants, and everyone else carries out. In a world AI is rewriting, that no longer works.
Drawing on decades inside Intel and work with executive teams across industries, the book shows how to make strategic thinking a capability across your organization: seeing your system clearly, making deliberate choices, using AI to strengthen judgment rather than replace it, and keeping strategy alive as conditions change.
AI is changing the nature of strategic work.
It speeds up research and analysis, but faster answers don’t produce better choices.
Traditional planning can’t keep pace.
Annual cycles and static decks don’t suit markets that change every quarter.
Organizations need more strategists.
Leaders can’t make every consequential decision from the top.
Three acts and nine chapters, each with a strategist profile, a guiding manifesto and practical exercises.
Act I · Becoming a Strategist
1
Rethinking Strategy
2
Strategy in the Age of AI
3
Strategy Is a Team Sport
Act II · Building Strategic Capability
4
Start with Systems
5
From Analysis to Action
6
Strategic Leadership
Act III · Keeping Strategy Alive
7
Strategy Engagement
8
Strategic Measurement
9
When Culture Turns Against Strategy
AN EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 1
Our forthcoming book draws on the lessons and stories from our years at Intel, the place we call our strategy lab. Chapter 1 opens in a Santa Clara conference room in 2020.
We Need to Get the Consulting Firm on the Phone
In 2020, Bernhard sat in a standard gray conference room on the sixth floor of Intel’s Santa Clara headquarters, watching a strategy conversation stall.
The meeting was preparation for an upcoming Strategic Long-Range Planning, or SLRP, session with Intel’s CEO and executive team. Around the table were some of the company’s most accomplished technical leaders, including Intel Fellows, technology vice presidents, and the general manager of the Technology Manufacturing Group, who would ultimately present the strategy to the CEO.
SLRP had deep roots at Intel. Andy Grove had created it as a forum for looking beyond the immediate demands of the business and wrestling with changes that could alter Intel’s future. Leaders were expected to challenge one another, form a point of view, and decide what Intel should do about what they saw coming.
The subject that day was heterogeneous computing, an important and complex shift in how computing systems were being designed. There was no obvious answer, which was precisely why the conversation mattered. But it wasn’t going well. Ideas circled without progress. Bernhard tried to structure the discussion, but the room didn’t engage. As the minutes passed, the tension mounted.
Eventually, the general manager spoke:
That declaration stayed with Bernhard because calling a consultant wasn’t the issue. Intel had long worked with outside experts, as most large companies do. A strong outside perspective can challenge assumptions, bring expertise, and reveal what insiders have stopped seeing.
What troubled him was the word lead.
Here was a room full of people who understood Intel’s technology, capabilities, and competitive environment as well as anyone. Yet when the strategic question became difficult, their instinct was not to wrestle with it together. Instead, they sought someone else to structure the thinking for them.
That was a long way from the Intel Bernhard knew. At its best, Intel expected its leaders to debate hard questions, confront uncomfortable evidence, and develop their own point of view. Expertise was welcome. Challenge was essential. But the responsibility for thinking about Intel’s future belonged inside Intel.
The moment in that conference room posed a harder question than anything on the meeting agenda: how had a company built on rigorous debate and independent thinking become so unsure of its ability to lead a strategy conversation?
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Dr. Brandon Barnett, Bernhard Ries and Pam Kelley-Dockter are the leadership team behind Trigate Coaching. Their careers at Intel took them through technological disruption, consequential strategic choices and the work of aligning people around a shared direction. Together they bring experience in strategic leadership, systems thinking, organizational transformation, executive coaching and AI-enabled strategy.
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