Author: fwadmin_chron

As a member of the C-suite with a commitment to long-term success, you may find yourself at odds with the culture around you.

You’ve come to realize that your role has subtly but fundamentally shifted. While others are chasing quarterly numbers, you’ve begun to see your job through a different lens: one of legacy-building. You’re being pulled into the future, tasked—whether formally or not—with the responsibility of stewarding the organisation across decades, not just financial years.

But here’s the challenge: how do you bring others along with you? How do you persuade a board of directors, fellow executives, investors, and employees to prioritize the long game in a world of short-term incentives?

This is not an easy undertaking. In fact, changing how leaders think about strategy is one of the most difficult challenges in any organisation—especially successful ones.

The Resistance You’ll Meet

Take a step back. The leaders around you didn’t get to the top by being slow or visionary. They were rewarded—often repeatedly—for producing immediate results. Many of them built careers by tackling crises, hitting aggressive targets, and outpacing competitors. To them, leadership is synonymous with rapid action and tangible wins.

So when you start talking about “the next decade” instead of “the next quarter,” expect to encounter skepticism—or worse, indifference. You’ll find yourself talking about long-term transformation to people whose reputations, bonuses, and egos are anchored in the short term.

Yet your instincts tell you that this moment demands something different. You’ve seen what happens to companies that delay the future. Think Netflix versus Blockbuster. Apple’s iPhone versus Nokia and Blackberry. You understand that anticipating and shaping what’s next is no longer optional—it’s essential for survival.

When the Future Becomes Your Responsibility

The strange thing is, you probably didn’t sign up for this. Most executives aren’t formally tasked with long-range planning. You may not have a title like “Chief Vision Officer” or “Head of Strategic Futures.” But somewhere along the line, the burden of long-term thinking has landed on your shoulders. You are the unofficial guardian of the future.

And while some rise to the challenge, others freeze. Some feel paralysed, unsure of how to move forward without formal authority or clarity. Others rationalize their inaction: “The world is changing too fast,” they say. “We need to stay agile, not idealistic.” Or, “We can’t focus on tomorrow when we’re struggling to meet payroll today.”

Those may sound like pragmatic statements—but left unchallenged, they become excuses that entrench short-termism and degrade strategic clarity.

You Might Be a Liability

Here’s a difficult truth: if you’ve seen the need for long-term strategy and choose not to act on it, you may be doing more harm than good.

Executives often see promotions as rewards for past performance. Some become preoccupied with proving they belong in the role. Others fall into the trap of “Imposter Syndrome,” second-guessing their right to think differently or challenge existing paradigms. And many double down on what worked in the past: more short-term execution, more urgency, more firefighting.

But that’s not what your organisation needs from you now.

Remember Kodak? At its height, it was a global juggernaut. But a failure to confront long-term realities cost it over US$31 billion in value and 128,000 jobs. The signs were there. What was missing was leadership willing to act on them.

Persuasion as a Strategic Skill

If you’re waiting to take a course or attend a strategy retreat before acting, think again. The pace of change means you can’t afford to disappear for even a day without consequence.

Instead, see persuasion itself as a mode of learning. Every time you initiate a courageous conversation with a colleague about the future, you sharpen your understanding. Use questions like:

• “What’s the long-term impact of this decision?”
• “What systemic issues are we failing to address?”
• “What future trends are we not discussing?”
• “What goals would inspire our stakeholders ten years from now?”
• “Which breakthroughs are we ignoring because they don’t pay off this quarter?”

These questions are disarming. They don’t require formal authority. But they do require courage.

You’ll need to tailor your approach to your context—whether you’re in a multinational corporation, a government ministry, a non-profit, an educational institution, or a startup. The principles remain the same: be the voice of long-term thinking in rooms dominated by short-term pressure.

Building Fluency, Not Just Faith

You may wonder whether it’s enough to just champion long-termism and let your enthusiasm carry the message.

Unfortunately, no.

If you’re not fluent in the arguments and counterarguments, you’ll be vulnerable to professional naysayers—those who use sophisticated logic to resist change. They’re often well-respected, experienced, and deeply invested in the status quo. Without preparation, they will derail your meetings, stall your initiatives, and seed doubt in others.

So don’t stop at intuition. Build expertise. Study long-term successes and failures. Read case studies. Watch YouTube documentaries. Analyze how visionaries like Steve Jobs, Satya Nadella, or Zohran Mamdani frame the future in specific, compelling language. Study the language of leaders who inspire action across timeframes.

Becoming fluent allows you to do more than make a good point—it allows you to win the room.

Final Thought

No one is born with the ability to shift other minds from a focus on “this quarter” to “this decade.” It’s not a natural skill—it’s a deliberate one. But if you cultivate it, refine it, and use it consistently, you’ll help your organisation navigate the future with intention instead of reaction.

Otherwise, you risk remaining a hostage—trapped by the logic of short-term thinkers and the inertia of yesterday’s success.

Start the practice today. The future is waiting for your leadership.

As a senior executive, one of your most crucial and delicate responsibilities is the communication of strategic plans to employees, board members, and key stakeholders. But how should you do it? Is it enough to share a dense, one-off report? Or can AI finally offer a way to transform this traditionally frustrating task into something more interactive and engaging?

Most leaders dread this stage of the strategy cycle. The excitement of a successful off-site retreat or board strategy session has passed. Now, the hard part begins: conveying the essence of the plan to those who weren’t in the room, yet are expected to bring it to life.

The conventional approach hasn’t changed much in decades. First, circulate a written document filled with bullet points, jargon, and long-term goals. Next, convene a town hall meeting, supported by a string of PowerPoint slides. Questions are few. Attention drifts. Finally, you pass the baton to middle managers to cascade the strategy to their teams, hoping they convey the message with clarity and enthusiasm. Often, they don’t. Miscommunication spreads. Employees receive mixed signals. Strategic alignment becomes a fantasy.

The result is predictable: confusion, disengagement, and inertia.

The Communication Gap

Why does this happen, even in well-managed companies?

Because strategy is inherently difficult to explain. Unlike routine business matters, it deals with the future—a future that is unpredictable and unknowable. Strategic thinking requires executives to rely on incomplete data, make educated bets, and reason through complex interdependencies.

Most employees, however, are trained to execute, not theorize. They want certainty. But strategy rarely offers it. It requires abstract thinking, conceptual frameworks, and trust in leadership judgment.

To compound the problem, many employees have no idea what the company’s strategy is. Surveys routinely show that a significant portion of the workforce cannot articulate their organisation’s strategic direction. That’s not because they lack intelligence, but because the way strategy is usually communicated makes it inaccessible.

The old approach—a top-down, one-way message—no longer suffices in a world where you are hiring for brains, not brawn. If your employees are going to make smart, real-time decisions that support the strategy, they need to understand the “why” behind the “what.”

From Monologue to Dialogue

Today’s leaders must embrace a new mindset: communication is not just about broadcasting; it’s about engagement. The onus is no longer on the employee to decipher a static report or passively sit through a presentation. Instead, it is the executive’s responsibility to foster understanding—to create conditions in which meaningful dialogue can occur.

Fortunately, advances in artificial intelligence offer new pathways. Specifically, large language models (LLMs) such as NotebookLM, a “Source Language Model,” can help transform strategy communication from a passive event into an interactive, personalised experience.

What Makes NotebookLM Different?

Unlike general-purpose AI tools that respond based on pre-trained knowledge, NotebookLM grounds its responses entirely in documents you upload. This means your actual strategy files—slide decks, board reports, workshop outputs—become the exclusive source of truth. The app processes your data, then allows users to interact with it intelligently.

Here’s how to use it.

1. Upload your strategic materials. These could include the formal plan, background analyses, executive summaries, transcripts or even FAQs.
2. Design prompt sets for different levels of strategic maturity:
   • Basic Prompts for new hires or employees unfamiliar with strategic planning. These focus on summaries, definitions, and the background story—ideal for onboarding or setting context.
   • Intermediate Prompts for general staff. These might explore implications, comparisons, and potential challenges in execution.
   • Advanced Prompts for experienced team members or high-potentials. These require synthesis across documents, evaluation of assumptions, or the generation of novel ideas based on strategic intent.

The goal is to provide each employee with an opportunity to interrogate the strategy at their own level. Because the responses are personalised and context-aware, employees engage with the material in a way that suits their curiosity, experience, and role.

Make It Playful and Challenging

To increase engagement, you can even add a layer of gamification. Frame the interaction around a scenario—for example, “Play the Devil’s Advocate.” Ask staff to identify potential flaws, contradictions, or unspoken assumptions. Give their inputs scores or feedback. Celebrate insightful critiques.

This simple, low-cost exercise can breathe life into a strategy document that would otherwise be skimmed or ignored. It empowers employees to participate in shaping strategic thinking, rather than being passive recipients of edicts from above.

A New Era of Strategic Engagement

We are entering an era where employees expect more than a memo or slide deck. They want to understand the company’s direction, contribute ideas, and be involved in shaping the future. AI tools like NotebookLM don’t just allow this—they encourage it.

For the first time, executives can enable a genuine two-way dialogue about strategy, at scale. They can foster a sense of ownership among staff who would otherwise feel excluded or overwhelmed.

The days of rolling out a strategic plan as a one-way monologue are over. Embrace a model that invites curiosity, fosters understanding, and deepens engagement. With the right tools and mindset, your strategy won’t just be communicated—it will be understood, internalised, and acted upon.