The early journey of Instagram offers a creative playbook involving evangelists, a self-sustaining community, and strong networks to gain product traction.

Be on the right side of history and your balance sheet by doing right by your customers. Your marginalized customers are only as loyal as the limitations of the next best option.

Every company needs to tell a compelling story which shows a clear mastery over a changing future. The only powerful way to do this is to show an easy to understand alignment between the broader business trends and your day to day business choices.

Assuming you're in tune with what your customer values; what initiatives and investments do you have in place to keep winning customers, increase their spend each time, and eliminate hurdles in their buying experience? Being customer-centric doesn’t mean anything if your initiatives and investments don’t always seek to establish it as a reality for your company every single day.

Cross-pollinate your strategy influences. Keep an eye on what’s happening in other industries and innovative companies beyond your familiar set. There’s a bias for executives to look inward within their own company, maybe even study the past, or look at their peer companies to craft strategy. Sometimes the smartest strategy might be to borrow effective strategies from other industries and make it your own. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel always!

Why stop empathy mapping at the user or customer level? Why not extend it to every stakeholder in your company’s ecosystem? Let’s not use empathy mapping strictly for user experience design alone. Let’s think about empathy mapping as a collaborative tool for value creation for every stakeholder.

The ecosystem mindset stops you from being passive or reactive in a market. This mindset forces you to take an active role in generating value while uncovering new ways to capture more value. Analyzing any market with the ecosystem mindset stops you from being completely surprised by market developments.

Any sound strategy in this unpredictable world might in fact need to work like a boxer capable of taking hits and still punching back strongly. Shape your strategic plan to sustain and prosper despite the hits from the ever-changing reality.

Articulate your value in a unique manner for every customer or customer group that you come across. Link it to specific impacts on their business. Develop case studies to show how you can deliver on those business impacts.

The capacity to build an enlightening narrative is crucial in corporate strategy. Wall Street appreciates this a lot too and they respond in kind through their impact on your company’s stock price.

The mission along with a focused vision statement can truly shape the identity of any company. The employees get their directives from these statements. Any stakeholder for your company also understands what you’re all about through these statements.

Fighting corporate inertia is never an easy task. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the bureaucracy that you might see in your company. At the same time, it’s never a good idea to leave an opportunity to make a difference and jump in with your best efforts to address a problem.

You can’t always expect to copy your competitor’s moves and hope to outsmart them every single time. A significant proclivity to offbeat thinking pays off in the long term.

Strategy shouldn’t be an abstract concept. It needs to be relatable. It needs to be actionable. It needs to be down to earth.