Learn Strategy: The Best Resources to Accelerate Your Career

Learning strategy is a lifelong journey. After all, strategy as about anticipating and adapting to change, and change will always be a timeless constant throughout history (and your career).

Over the past ten years I’ve grown a lot as a strategist, personally, through a variety of different paths. Especially through reading, observing and mentorship. So for all the aspiring strategists out there, I’m making this page a hub to share my favorite and best strategy resources, articles and videos.

Essential Strategy Resources (Start Here)

• Strategy: How to Develop, Structure and Shape a Winning System
• Strategy: Essential Foundations for Management, Consulting and Startup Success (my introduction to strategy class on Skillshare)
• Why Strategy Does Not Exist (And Everything is Strategic) (Martin Weigel of Wieden+Kennedy)
• Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (Farnam Street)
• Game Theory (Coursera)
• Life Formulas (Naval Ravikant)

Startup Strategy

• My Personal Growth Strategy Template
• Know Your Customer’s Jobs to Be Done (HBR)
• 12 Things About Product-Market Fit (Andreessen Horowitz)
• To Grow Faster, Hit Pause (First Round Review)

Going Deeper on Strategy

• Managing the Strategy Journey (McKinsey)
• How to Explain a (Strategic) Idea (Mark Pollard)
• The Economic Essentials of Digital Strategy (McKinsey)
• I’m Sorry But Those Are Vanity Metrics (First Round Review)

My Favorite Books on Strategy and Strategic Thinking

• The Art Of War by Sun Tzu
• Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by Stanley McChrystal
• The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
• Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World by Jill Jonnes
• The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (Collins Business Essentials) by Geoffrey Moore
• Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard Rumelt
• Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry by Marc Benioff
• Cyberspies: The Secret History of Surveillance, Hacking, and Digital Espionage by Gordon Corera
• Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway

The Best Podcasts for Strategists

• How I Built This (NPR)
• Masters of Scale (Reid Hoffman)
• a16z Podcast (Andreessen Horowitz)
• Invest Like the Best (Investor’s Field Guide)
• The Frontline Dispatch (NPR)

Standout Videos, Films and TV Shows

• Briefly (the Art of the Brief) (available on Vimeo)
• Undefeated (available on Netflix)
• Halt and Catch Fire (available on Netflix)
• Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (available on Netflix)
• Herb & Dorothy

If you have any other great recommended strategy reads or content, mention or link to them in a comment here or send me a message and I’ll review them for inclusion on this page. Thanks.