2026: When Strategy Leaves the Organization
What comes next — and how to join with 35% off
To mark the start of 2026, I’m opening a New Year offer for The Strategy Stack.
For the next 3 days only, you can become a paid annual subscriber with 35% off — locked in forever.
This is not a promotion for content volume. It’s an invitation into applied strategy as the work expands beyond the organization itself.
Instead of $100 / year, you’ll pay $65 / year
(around $5.40 per month).
Dear Subscribers,
January 1 is usually a moment for optimism. This year, it’s also a moment of clarity.
Looking back at 2025, a pattern stands out more clearly than ever: the distance between ideas and execution shrank. Not because narratives improved — but because strategy was forced to operate inside real organizations, under real constraints.
Across writing, teaching, mentoring, and client work, the year became less about frameworks as explanations and more about frameworks as operating systems.
Early in the year, conversations around Web3 and AI shifted noticeably. At NFT Paris, speculation gave way to infrastructure. At Proof of Talk, implementation replaced storytelling. With founders, leadership teams, and students, the same question kept surfacing: What actually works once the slides are gone?
Mentoring with Brinc reinforced this quickly. When strategy meets product, capital, and time pressure, elegance disappears — and decisions remain. The same was true in leadership rooms later in the year, whether applying agentic models, digitalization strategies, or organizational redesigns across cultures and institutions.
Writing followed the same arc. Agentic Strategy was published in August and immediately left the realm of theory. Its real impact came from working with leadership teams applying the ideas in practice — building decision-making capacity, not just alignment. Contributing to the third edition of Transformation and Turnaround Management reinforced that serious strategy is rarely about reinvention; it is about disciplined execution under uncertainty.
Teaching in Kufstein and engaging with European industry communities in Barcelona closed the loop. Strategy today is not about predicting the future. It is about designing systems that can respond when predictions fail.
Three convictions were reinforced in 2025:
Strategy is an operating system, not a deck
Agentic organizations are built through decisions, not slogans
Skepticism is essential when narratives outrun reality
I’m deeply grateful to the students, founders, clients, readers, and collaborators who shaped this year — often by challenging assumptions rather than confirming them.
What’s next
In 2026, The Strategy Stack moves beyond the organization itself.
The next book, Working Title: “Beyond the Organization” — a sequel to Agentic Strategy — explores the environment in which agentic organizations actually live: markets that behave like systems, technologies that act as participants, and decision-making that no longer stops at organizational boundaries. It’s about strategy once agency is distributed — and control is not.
Alongside the book, the ongoing Business Model series continues with Chapter 7: Data, Intelligence, and Learning Loops, extending the work from structure into interaction — exploring how data becomes leverage, how intelligence layers form, and how learning speed reshapes value creation, capture, and defense when organizations are no longer the only actors in the system.
From there, the series moves into Chapter 8 on Ecosystem Strategy and Embedded Distribution, Chapter 9 on Scale, Modularity, and Optionality, and Chapter 10 on Defense, Moats, and Strategic Entropy, before closing with Chapter 11 on Regulation, Trust, and AI Ethics and Chapter 12 on Strategic Models and Practitioner Tools.
New formats will also emerge. Some ideas demand essays. Others require conversation, iteration, and friction. To support that, I’ll be going live again — Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays — to think out loud, test ideas, and engage directly with readers and practitioners.
As always, the goal remains the same: applied strategy that survives contact with reality.
If this resonates, now is a good moment to step in more deeply.
For the next 3 days, the New Year offer is open.
Paid subscribers get:
Full access to the archive and future deep-dive essays
Practical strategy tools used in real client and leadership work
Early access to new frameworks, case analyses, and long-form thinking
If you’ve been reading quietly, this is the cleanest way to support the work — and to stay close as the next chapter takes shape.
Start now with this collection from my ongoing Business Model Series:
What others are saying
The Strategy Stack helped me reframe strategy from something we present to something we operate. It’s one of the few places where agentic organizations are discussed without hype — and with real implications for leadership decisions.
— Chief Executive Officer, Global Technology Company
What I value most is the skepticism. The Strategy Stack doesn’t chase trends — it stress-tests them. For anyone responsible for innovation at scale, this is required reading.
— Chief Innovation Officer, European Industrial Group
Most strategy writing stops at insight. This goes further into system design, decision-making, and execution under constraint. It’s shaped how we think about data, intelligence, and learning loops inside the organization.
— Head of Strategy, International Financial Services Firm
Thank you for being part of the conversation.
See you sometime, somewhere very soon!
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➡️ Forward this to a strategy peer who’s feeling the same shift. We’re building a smarter, tech-equipped strategy community—one layer at a time.
Let’s stack it up.
A. Pawlowski | The Strategy Stack