How to lead strategically every day

Here's Lena Reinhard's problem: the CTOs and VPs who need strategic thinking most are the ones running from meeting to meeting with zero time for it. Your calendar is running your life. Strategy isn't about the documents you write, it's about your habits. The way you think and spend your time is the kind of leader you are.

Her solution is STABB: Space, Think, Act, Boundaries, Broadcast. It's a framework that makes strategic leadership a daily practice, not a quarterly offsite. Start with 15 minutes every morning before you open your laptop. Before Slack, before email, before all the dopamine-triggering apps. You reflect on four questions: What's most important? What are we not doing to accomplish it? How can I help my team connect their work to strategy? How am I investing in capabilities we need? Write down your answers. Do this daily and you build two things: a notebook of strategic thoughts to reference later, and a habit that shows up in the rest of your day.

Weekly, spend 30 minutes gathering information. Review industry news, customer insights, team metrics. Ask: What am I seeing and hearing? What could it mean for our company? Connect your team to strategy by talking about why you're doing what you're doing. Use second-order thinking for decisions, thinking through first and second-order consequences to assess real long-term value. Broadcast weekly updates to your boss and stakeholders, pushing information instead of waiting for them to pull it.

Quarterly, review your strategy. Check it for internal consistency, market changes, available resources, degree of risk, and workability. Your strategy shouldn't be a document in a drawer. It needs to stay alive and relevant. A new habit takes two months to develop, up to 254 days to fully form. Every day counts. Take a STABB at the bagel of strategy every day and strategic leadership becomes sustainable, not another thing drowning in meeting overload.