Crafting Engineering Strategy

Chapter 24. How to Get Better at Strategy

One of the most memorable quotes in Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman is Uncle Ben’s description of his path to wealth: “When I was seventeen, I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich.”

I wish I could describe the path to learning engineering strategy in similar terms, but by all accounts it’s a much slower path. Two decades in, I am still learning more from each project I work on. This book has aimed to accelerate your learning path, but my experience is that there’s still a great deal left to learn, despite what this book has hoped to accomplish.

You are already familiar with my general suggestions on creating strategy, so this chapter provides focused advice on creating your own strategy to get better at strategy. It covers:

• Where to find strategies you can learn from

• How to diagnose the strategies you’ve found to ensure you learn the right lessons

• How to perform and practice strategy within your organization, whether or not you have organizational authority

• Operational mechanisms to hold yourself accountable for developing a strategy practice

With that preamble, let’s write this book’s final strategy: your personal strategy for developing your strategy practice.

Exploring Strategy Creation

Ideally, you could begin improving your engineering strategy skills by reading publicly available examples to learn from others’ experience. Unfortunately, there simply aren’t ...