CEO Guides & Resources
These resources are built for leaders who want to think better about strategy - whether or not they ever pick up the phone. Each diagnostic tool and guide is grounded in the Essential Strategy Formula and informed by 30+ years of working inside organizations where the stakes are real and the plans have to hold up under pressure. Some will challenge what you've been taught about strategic planning, organizational design, and leadership. All of them are designed to help you see your organization more clearly, because what you can see, you can address. What you can't, runs the show without your permission.
Everything on this page is free!
No strings attached. I hope you find these diagnostic tools and guides both informative and useful!
Strategy Design Diagnostic
You can't fix what you can't see. This self-assessment walks CEOs and Executive Directors through 20 diagnostic questions across strategic pillars of Purpose, Growth, Evolution, and Equilibrium designed to surface the patterns, gaps, and imbalances that traditional planning processes miss. No grades. No judgment. Just a clear-eyed look at where your strategy's design is strong, where it's quietly breaking down, and where to focus next.
Pair it with the Strategic Performance Team Diagnostic for the complete picture: the health of the strategy and the health of the team that carries it.
Strategic Performance Team Diagnostic
Strategy doesn't fail in the market first. It fails in the space between your senior leaders — in the assumptions never surfaced, the trust never tested, and the patterns everyone can feel but nobody names. This free self-assessment examines the five most common dynamics that undermine strategic execution from the inside out. The diagnostic gives you a scored baseline and reflection questions designed to surface what's actually driving — or quietly eroding — your team's capacity to execute.
Pair it with the Strategy Design Diagnostic for a complete picture: the health of your strategy and the health of the team that carries it.
The CEO Survival Guide
40–60% of new CEOs fail within the first 18 months. Not because they lack talent — because they don't have a roadmap. This guide is that roadmap. Built from 30+ years of working alongside executives in organizations of every size and complexity, it walks new and seasoned CEOs and Executive Directors through three critical phases of transition — from discovery through strategic foundation-building to activation — grounded in the Essential Strategy framework that treats your organization as the living system it actually is.
CEO Guide to Choosing a Strategic Planning Facilitator
Every CEO has a risk appetite. Few have defined it clearly enough to guide anything. This guide cuts through the vague boardroom language and gives you a practical framework — the Essential Strategy Risk Appetite (ESRA) Framework — for connecting risk directly to strategic intent. Four questions, aligned to Purpose, Growth, Evolution, and the Critical Path. No jargon. No heatmaps. Just the structured conversations your leadership team needs to turn risk appetite from a governance placeholder into a leadership tool.
The CEO's Guide to Quantum Intelligence
The management model most organizations still run on is over a century old — and it shows. Ninety percent of strategies fail to execute. Leadership teams spend less than an hour a month discussing the strategy they spent months building. And 40–60% of new executives fail within 18 months. These aren't execution problems. They're design problems. This guide introduces Quantum Intelligence and shows CEOs how to apply that understanding to the way they lead, build teams, and design strategy that actually survives contact with reality.
CEO’s Strategy Stress Test
Most strategic plans underperform not because of poor execution, but because of gaps in design — gaps that are invisible until you know where to look. The Strategy Stress Test is a structured exercise that applies the Purpose, Growth, and Evolution lens to the plan you already have, revealing where the weight is distributed, where the imbalances are hiding, and what that means for the strategy you're trying to execute. It also introduces the risk appetite conversation most leadership teams skip — and why skipping it costs more than they realize. No starting over required.
