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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 New 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 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.
The CRO Guide Connecting ERM to Strategy
ERM was supposed to connect risk to strategy. It never quite got there. The reasons aren't what most people think. This guide is written for Chief Risk Officers and senior risk leaders who know their program produces valuable intelligence but can't get it to land in the strategy conversation. It walks through the three structural reasons ERM stalled at the strategy doorstep, introduces the keystone risk concept for distinguishing strategy-critical risk from everything else, and lays out a practical approach for layering a strategic lens onto your existing plan without starting over.
CEO Guide to Better Strategy
This guide gives CEOs a practical framework for strengthening the strategy they already have — without scrapping it and starting over. Using the Essential Strategy lens of Purpose, Growth, Evolution, and Equilibrium, you'll map your existing imperatives, see the structural gaps traditional planning misses, define the risk appetite boundaries your leadership team has likely been operating without, and understand the six attributes that distinguish organizations that thrive from those that merely perform. It's the logical next step after the PGEE Strategy Health Assessment.
Essential Strategy Quick Reference
Every organization needs three things to succeed: Purpose, Growth, and Evolution. Most strategic plans address one or two. Almost none address all three, and that's why they fail. This quick reference guide introduces the Essential Strategy Formula, the science behind it, and the PGEE foundation that connects strategic intent to organizational reality. If you're going to rethink how you build strategy, start here.
