Strategist

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A strategist is a person with responsibility for the formulation and implementation of a strategy. Strategy generally involves setting goals, determining actions to achieve the goals, and mobilizing resources to execute the actions. A strategy describes how the ends (goals) will be achieved by the means (resources). The senior leadership of an organization is generally tasked with determining strategy. Strategy can be intended or can emerge as a pattern of activity as the organization adapts to its environment or competes. It involves activities such as strategic planning and strategic thinking. [1]

Contents

Types of strategists by field

The strategy role exists in a variety of organizations and fields of study.

In large corporations, strategic planners or corporate financial planning and analysis (FP&A) personnel are involved in the formulation and implementation of the organization's strategy. The strategy is typically set by business leaders such as the chief executive officer and key business or functional leaders and is reviewed by the board of directors. [1]

An AI strategist uses evidence and reason to make circumstance-dependent decisions that shape the development of AI towards a set of desired outcomes. The scope of AI development can range from within small organizations to global landscape.

A design strategist has the ability to combine the innovative, perceptive and holistic insights of a designer with the pragmatic and systemic skills of a planner to guide strategic direction in context of business needs, brand intent, design quality and customer values. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

An economic strategist is a person who can create a sustainable commercial advantage by applying innovative and quantitative ideas and systems at a sell side financial institution.

A political strategist is a multi-discipline strategist who works within political campaigns. Also known as political consulting, the political strategist will advise a campaign on a range of activities such as media, resourcing, opposition research, opinion polling and engagement strategy.

A sport strategist is a professional that performs scouting and analysis of the players involved in an upcoming competitive match. Sports strategists typically analyze film footage, organize video libraries, and recommend attacks and defensive strategies in order to capitalize on an opponent's weaknesses.

Working closely with investment managers, a principal investment strategist contributes revenue by providing principal investment analytics and alternative product structuring.

A sales strategist develops innovative trade ideas and assists in the marketing of those trades to buy side clients.

A banking strategist partners with investment bankers and capital market experts on corporate finance and capital structure analyses to identify and execute banking transactions.

A trading strategist contributes revenue to the business in which his team is embedded by developing and delivering innovative trade ideas, models and analytic systems to the trading desk.

Within the financial services industry, strategists are known as “strats”.

A military strategist develops strategies in the field of warfare with the objective of outmaneuvering their opponent.

An IT Strategist develops an IT strategy that is aligned with the business strategy to implement systems to give business processes efficiency and productivity gains and therefore a possible competitive advantage.

Strategist as a personality type

Strategists are known to have an INTJ personality trait [ citation needed ], based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The MBTI was derived from Psychiatrist Carl Jung theory of psychological types enabling us to have a better understanding of people's personality traits and what their strengths are as a person, although the research shows MBTI to be an unreliable measure of categorising personality types. [7] It is commonly found[ weasel words ] that strategists are more prone to possess a combination of 4 specific personality traits, which includes Introversion, Intuition, Thinking and Judgment (forming the acronym INTJ). However, this combination of personality traits is known to be very rare among people [ citation needed ], making strategists to be very sought after especially by major[ clarification needed ] firms. [8] Dr. Vladimir Kvint defined strategist as a wise, disciplined, and optimistic professional with a strategic mindset, a vision of the future, and intuition. [9] It is possible at times to find that the vision or ideas of a strategist may not be align with conventional ideas which can make it difficult for others to accept or envision. [10]

Career paths

People who possess a strategist mindset are generally capable of doing well in any possible field due to the various traits that they own[ citation needed ]. Strategists tend to follow a career path that challenges them mentally in terms of development, and seek to work with people who are in the same caliber in terms of intelligence and competency[ citation needed ]. As it is highly likely that people with a strategist mindset tend to be more single-minded and may not be appreciative of others' effort[ weasel words ], it is crucial for them to work in a suitable working environment.

Common careers that strategists tend to choose are:

  1. Academia [11]
  2. Computing [11]
  3. Engineering [11]
  4. Sciences [11]
  5. Project Management [11]
  6. Research and development [11]
  7. Management [11]

Strategists can have a variety of backgrounds such journalism, speech writing, data analyzing, or telemarketing. People with a background of public relations or advertising can be hired as strategists because of their experience in market research and message delivery. [12]

See also

Related Research Articles

Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that examines personality and its variation among individuals. It aims to show how people are individually different due to psychological forces. Its areas of focus include:

Strategy is a general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty. In the sense of the "art of the general", which included several subsets of skills including military tactics, siegecraft, logistics etc., the term came into use in the 6th century C.E. in Eastern Roman terminology, and was translated into Western vernacular languages only in the 18th century. From then until the 20th century, the word "strategy" came to denote "a comprehensive way to try to pursue political ends, including the threat or actual use of force, in a dialectic of wills" in a military conflict, in which both adversaries interact.

In psychology and sociology, socionics is a pseudoscientific theory of information processing and personality types. It incorporates Carl Jung's work on Psychological Types with Antoni Kępiński's theory of information metabolism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Myers–Briggs Type Indicator</span> Non-scientific personality questionnaire

The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a self-report questionnaire that pseudoscientific claims purport can indicate differing "psychological types" or "personality types".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mindset</span> Term in decision theory and general systems theory

A mindset refers to an established set of attitudes of a person or group concerning culture, values, philosophy, frame of reference, outlook, or disposition. It may also arise from a person's worldview or beliefs about the meaning of life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Strategic management</span> Planning for a companys responses to external issues

In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization operates. Strategic management provides overall direction to an enterprise and involves specifying the organization's objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve those objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the plans. Academics and practicing managers have developed numerous models and frameworks to assist in strategic decision-making in the context of complex environments and competitive dynamics. Strategic management is not static in nature; the models can include a feedback loop to monitor execution and to inform the next round of planning.

Marketing strategy refers to efforts undertaken by an organization to increase its sales and achieve competitive advantage. In other words, it is the method of advertising a company's products to the public through an established plan through the meticulous planning and organization of ideas, data, and information.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Personality test</span> Method of assessing human personality constructs

A personality test is a method of assessing human personality constructs. Most personality assessment instruments are in fact introspective self-report questionnaire measures or reports from life records (L-data) such as rating scales. Attempts to construct actual performance tests of personality have been very limited even though Raymond Cattell with his colleague Frank Warburton compiled a list of over 2000 separate objective tests that could be used in constructing objective personality tests. One exception, however, was the Objective-Analytic Test Battery, a performance test designed to quantitatively measure 10 factor-analytically discerned personality trait dimensions. A major problem with both L-data and Q-data methods is that because of item transparency, rating scales, and self-report questionnaires are highly susceptible to motivational and response distortion ranging from lack of adequate self-insight to downright dissimulation depending on the reason/motivation for the assessment being undertaken.

The Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS) is a self-assessed personality questionnaire. It was first introduced in the book Please Understand Me. The KTS is closely associated with the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI); however, there are significant practical and theoretical differences between the two personality questionnaires and their associated different descriptions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Design management</span> Field of inquiry in business

Design management is a field of inquiry that uses design, strategy, project management and supply chain techniques to control a creative process, support a culture of creativity, and build a structure and organization for design. The objective of design management is to develop and maintain an efficient business environment in which an organization can achieve its strategic and mission goals through design. Design management is a comprehensive activity at all levels of business, from the discovery phase to the execution phase. "Simply put, design management is the business side of design. Design management encompasses the ongoing processes, business decisions, and strategies that enable innovation and create effectively-designed products, services, communications, environments, and brands that enhance our quality of life and provide organizational success." The discipline of design management overlaps with marketing management, operations management, and strategic management.

Strategic thinking is a mental or thinking process applied by an individual in the context of achieving a goal or set of goals. As a cognitive activity, it produces thought.

In psychology, personality type refers to the psychological classification of individuals. In contrast to personality traits, the existence of personality types remains extremely controversial. Types are sometimes said to involve qualitative differences between people, whereas traits might be construed as quantitative differences. According to type theories, for example, introverts and extraverts are two fundamentally different categories of people. According to trait theories, introversion and extraversion are part of a continuous dimension, with many people in the middle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vladimir Kvint</span> American economist

Vladimir L’vovich Kvint is a Russian-American economist and the Chair of the Department of Economic and Financial Strategy at the Moscow School of Economics of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. He is President of the International Academy of Emerging Markets. He is a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to marketing:

A chief strategy officer (CSO) is an executive that usually reports to the CEO and has primary responsibility for strategy formulation and management, including developing the corporate vision and strategy, overseeing strategic planning, and leading strategic initiatives, including M&A, transformation, partnerships, and cost reduction. Some companies give the title of chief strategist or chief business officer to its senior executives who are holding the top strategy role.

Strategic design is the application of future-oriented design principles in order to increase an organization's innovative and competitive qualities. Its foundations lie in the analysis of external and internal trends and data, which enables design decisions to be made on the basis of facts rather than aesthetics or intuition. The discipline is mostly practiced by design agencies or by internal development departments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Entrepreneurship</span> Taking financial risks in the hope of profit

Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk, and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones.

Geoffrey P. Chamberlain's theory of strategy was first published in 2010. The theory draws on the work of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Kenneth R. Andrews, Henry Mintzberg and James Brian Quinn but is more specific and attempts to cover the main areas they did not address. Chamberlain analyzes the strategy construct by treating it as a combination of four factors.

Entrepreneurial leadership is "organizing a group of people to achieve a common goal using proactive entrepreneurial behavior by optimising risk, innovating to take advantage of opportunities, taking personal responsibility and managing change within a dynamic environment for the benefit of [an] organisation".

References

  1. 1 2 Mintzberg, Henry and, Quinn, James Brian (1996). The Strategy Process: Concepts, Contexts, Cases. Prentice Hall. ISBN   978-0-132-340304.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  2. Lindinger, H., (1991), Ulm Design: The Morality of Objects, Cambridge: The MIT Press.
  3. Gorb, P., (1990) Design Management, London: Phaidon Press
  4. ”Design Management”, Papers from the London Business School, London: Architecture & Technology Press, 1990.
  5. Chung, K.; Freeze, K., “Design Strategy at Samsung Electronics: Becoming a Top-Tier Company″, Design Management Institute Case Study - Harvard Business School Publishing, 2008.
  6. Mataruna, L.; DaCosta, L.P. ,“Video-Scout Methods in Sports", The Brazilian Judo Methods - Case Study - Gama Filho University, 2010.
  7. Measuring the MBTI... And Coming Up Short by David J. Pittenger [online]https://jobtalk.indiana.edu/HRMWebsite/hrm/articles/develop/mbti.pdf [Accessed 22 Sep 2020]
  8. Alignedsigns.com, (2014). MBTI® Personality Type: Overview of INTJ, The "Strategist" -. [online] Available at: https://www.alignedsigns.com/blog/MBTI-Personality-Type-Overview-of-INTJ-The-Strategist.htm [Accessed 26 Oct. 2014].
  9. Kvint, Vladimir ( 2016 ). Strategy for the Global Market. Routledge, p. 43.
  10. Teamtechnology.co.uk, (2014). INTJ Personality Types In-Depth. [online] Available at: http://www.teamtechnology.co.uk/personality/types/intj/overview/ [Accessed 26 Oct. 2014].
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Teamtechnology.co.uk, (2014). INTJ careers (based on research). [online] Available at: http://www.teamtechnology.co.uk/personality/types/intj/careers/ [Accessed 26 Oct. 2014].
  12. Sides, J., Shaw, D. R., Grossmann, M., & Lipsitz, K. (2018). Campaigns & Elections (3rd ed., pp. 153-155). New York: W.W. Norton and Company.