Strategic Leadership: Set Direction and Execute Vision [EN]

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Most strategies are not wrong. They are simply never executed. The document exists, the offsite happened, and by March nobody can say what the company is trying to do.

Where the distance opens up

I have watched this from both sides. As a leader I have written strategies that lived in a slide deck and died there, and I have sat in offsites where twelve smart people produced a flipchart and no owner for anything on it. The failure is almost never the thinking. It is everything between the thinking and Monday morning: goals nobody owns, communication nobody heard, change nobody was prepared for, and managers who were never taught to run any of it.

What this course actually covers

Six blocks, in the order the work happens. First, strategic thinking itself: how a strategy is structured, how it connects to the business context, and how it is evaluated before anyone commits to it. Second, the strategy session: how to prepare it, who should be in the room, how to run two days of it, and how to leave with a written implementation plan rather than photographs of a whiteboard. Third, OKR: how a strategy becomes a set of goals with owners, how the quarterly cycle runs, how to close it, and how to connect goals to review, assessment and reward. Fourth, internal communication, which is where most strategies quietly die. Fifth, change management through Kotter's eight steps and the rider-elephant-path model. Sixth, developing the managers who will execute all of it.

A note on the first block

The eight lessons on strategic thinking are recorded in the language of people management: organisational architecture, engagement strategy, reward strategy, international talent. That is the domain they were filmed in, and I will not pretend otherwise. The structure underneath is general: how a top-level strategy decomposes into functional strategies, how each is assessed, and how the whole thing anchors into business context. If you lead any function, the frame transfers directly. If you lead people, it transfers with the examples included.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries. The OKR cases in this course include companies I ran the cycle inside, not only the ones from the books.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 42 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Frameworks you can run directly: gap analysis, the two-day session agenda, the OKR cycle, Kotter's eight steps

• Real cases from Google, Intel, Preply and iDeals

Where to start

Take the strategy your organisation published most recently and ask three people at random what it says. Whatever they answer is your real starting point. This course is about closing the distance between that answer and the document. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.

Who this course is for:

• Managers moving from running operations to setting direction,Executives whose strategy is written down and not visible in anyones week,Heads of function translating a company strategy into their own,Founders whose team cannot state where the company is going,Transformation and strategy specialists who own the plan and not the authority,Senior leaders responsible for developing the managers below them,Anyone who has run a strategy session and watched nothing change afterwards