NimblShift Strategy & People
Free guide · For owners, CEOs and leadership teams

Most businesses have plans. Fewer have made the choices those plans depend on.

The Five Questions Every Leadership Team Needs to Answer. A 12-page practical guide by Harold Simons and T.M. Gunderson, with a readiness check and a one-page worksheet for your next leadership meeting.

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Cover of the guide Build Your Strategy. Grow Your Business.

When a business is small, the owner can carry the strategy in their head.

As it grows, more people start making decisions, and each of them may have a different idea of what matters.

That is when things drift. More activity, more cost, and a busier business that is no clearer about where it is going.

Strategy does not need to be complicated. It is a clear set of choices about where you are going, how you will get there, and what you will stop doing.
A leadership team reviewing a plan together at a laptop
What this guide is about

Five questions. One order.

This guide breaks strategy into five questions. Answer them in order and your leadership team has a clearer way to make decisions, set priorities and grow the business. None of the five is complicated. That is rather the point.

  1. 01Current stateWhere are we actually?
  2. 02Where to playWhere will we compete, and what will we stop doing?
  3. 03Operating modelHow will this business have to run?
  4. 04People & cultureWho needs to lead it, and what do they need to be good at?
  5. 05Strategic planWhat happens first, and how will we know it is working?

You can answer these out of order. You just cannot rely on the answers.

In this guide, you'll get

The five questions, in the order that makes them work
What a weak answer sounds like, and what a real one contains
Where AI changes the question, and where it does not
A two-minute readiness check and a one-page worksheet

Who this is for

  • Owners and CEOs of growing businesses whose plans keep slipping
  • Leadership teams that work hard but pull in slightly different directions
  • Teams that start in the middle: hiring, buying technology or reorganizing before the bigger choices are made
  • Leaders weighing AI tools who want to redesign the work first
  • Anyone heading into a planning session who wants a better agenda than a list of priorities

What this is not

  • Not a strategy template to fill in and file
  • Not an AI product pitch
  • Not about doing more. It is about choosing what matters.
Leaders working through plans together at a table
The Five Questions

Bring this to your next leadership meeting.

Fill in the worksheet on your own, then compare. The gaps between your answers are the agenda.

Get the free guide