Strategy is still a craft
In the critical early days of the American Revolution, the same master craftsman who designed elegant buildings like Nassau Hall at Princeton also created the Delaware River defenses shown in the map of the Delaware river above. Robert Smith, one of the most important master builders of the American colonial period, was able to move fluidly between designing sophisticated architecture and solving urgent military challenges — demonstrating the versatility that characterizes the power of a craft and its mastery. This ability to adapt approaches to widely different contexts offers a powerful metaphor for strategy as it actually operates at its best: not through rigid adherence to single frameworks, but through practiced judgment applied to specific circumstances.
Over my last few posts I have written about what I feel “strategy” means, and how to think about its constituent parts. What should be a straightforward topic — the meaning of a single, commonly used word — is quite tricky. This shows up in practice. In a recent study we ran, executives leading companies that struggled to practice strategy to their advantage were nearly twice as likely as those great at it to report their top teams are poorly aligned about what high quality strategy means.
This weak alignment about strategy’s definition doesn’t happen despite broader clarity in the field of strategy. In fact, there are myriad definitions for strategy, and frameworks for designing it, all developed by smart, well-meaning, and passionate strategists. With each new framework can come debate about whether it better captures the essence of strategy than what came before. These debates can become heated, with advocates promoting their preferred approach as the definitive way to think about strategy.
But perhaps these framework debates miss a more fundamental point about the nature of strategy work itself. While we often speak of strategy as a profession, complete with formal frameworks and established “best practices,” in many ways it still resembles a craft. Understanding this distinction — between craft and profession — can help us better appreciate the complexities of strategy’s practice and how master practitioners navigate them.
A fascinating book, “From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth-Century America” by Mary N. Woods, illuminates this distinction through architecture’s evolution from craft to profession in North America. The parallels to strategy are insightful. Just as nineteenth-century America saw intense arguments about what constituted “good architecture,” we debate today what makes for “good strategy.” The transformation Woods describes offers valuable insights for understanding both our current framework debates and strategy’s underlying nature.
Crafts vs Professions
What exactly distinguishes a craft from a profession? A craft is characterized by knowledge gained through experience and apprenticeship, mastery demonstrated through practice, and wisdom passed down from expert to novice through observation and guided work. A profession, in contrast, typically involves formal education, standardized practices, established credentials, and broadly accepted frameworks. As Woods explains, the transition from one to the other involves establishing educational standards, creating professional organizations, developing shared frameworks, and crucially, achieving broad consensus on what constitutes expertise and excellence in the field.
In nineteenth-century architecture, this evolution played out over decades. Master builders, trained through apprenticeship and practical experience, gradually gave way to formally educated architects operating through established institutions. But the transition wasn’t simple or clean-cut. Elements of both craft and profession coexisted, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes in tension. The most successful practitioners often combined deep practical knowledge from craft traditions with the new formal approaches of the emerging profession.
Looking at strategy today, I see the hallmarks of a craft rather than a profession. While we have business schools teaching strategy courses and experts promoting frameworks, we lack broad consensus on standards and practices that characterizes true professions. Great strategy work still relies heavily on pattern recognition developed through experience, judgment honed through practice, and wisdom often passed down through apprenticeship-like relationships. Even our ongoing debates about frameworks suggest we’re still operating more in the realm of craft than profession.
While one may lament the complexities and challenges of strategy not being “professionalised,” its status as a craft means those who master it — master strategists — are especially powerful.
Master Craftsman Robert Smith
Robert Smith (1722–1777), perhaps the most renowned master builder in colonial America, illustrates the power of mastery over a craft. Smith was equally comfortable designing iconic institutional buildings and solving urgent practical challenges. His work ranged from Nassau Hall at Princeton University to the critical defensive fortifications that helped protect Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War.
Consider the map shown at the start of this article of the Delaware River and its defenses. Among the fortifications it depicts are the cheval de frise that Smith designed and built at Benjamin Franklin’s request. These underwater obstacles made of timber and iron that prevented the British navy from moving up the river to resupply their troops, buying crucial time for George Washington’s army to reach Valley Forge. Yet Smith was no mere practical builder. He was also responsible for sophisticated architectural works like Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia, home to the First Continental Congress, and what is now Brown University in Rhode Island.
These examples showed how Smith moved fluidly between roles we would today consider separate: architect, engineer, builder, and developer. A member of both the Carpenters’ Company (a guild of master builders) and the American Philosophical Society (an elite intellectual organization), Smith bridged what Woods calls “the divide between manual and intellectual vocations.” Smith’s abilities exemplify how masters of crafts adapt their skills across contexts.
Strategy Today as Craft
Understanding strategy as a craft rather than a profession helps explain and resolve many of our debates about frameworks. Just as Smith could design both classical buildings and military fortifications, master strategists know that different situations call for different approaches. The issue isn’t whether Porter’s Five Forces is “better” than our Structure-Conduct-Performance approach, or whether Where To Play-How To Win is “right” while others are “wrong.” Rather, like a master craftsman, the skilled strategist draws on multiple frameworks, mental models, approaches, and historical pattern recognition, selecting and adapting them based on the specific challenge at hand.
This craft perspective helps explain why attempts to establish a single “right” way to do strategy have consistently fallen short. While professions tend toward standardization and consensus, crafts embrace multiple valid approaches. A master craftsperson’s expertise isn’t about rigidly applying a single framework, but about knowing which approach will work best in each situation.
This explains why master strategists are often able to move between elegantly strategic challenges and brutally operational efforts, much as Smith moved between timeless architectural design and military engineering challenges. BMW CEO Oliver Zipse and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella both embody this capability at the helm of top Power Curvecompanies; Zipse led both BMW’s production network and strategy function before becoming CEO, and Nadella similarly held both deeply strategic and operational roles with Microsoft before becoming CEO.
Yet the versatility of master strategists doesn’t mean they operate without precision or clarity. In fact, the opposite is true. Like all true masters of a craft, they recognize that a shared understanding of fundamental concepts is essential. As I explored in “The Meaning of Strategy,” when teams lack a common language for key strategic terms, they don’t just communicate poorly — they literally think about problems differently. Master strategists therefore invest considerable effort in establishing clear definitions of pivotal terms like “strategy” and “competitive advantage” with their teams, ensuring these definitions are consistently applied. They’re acutely aware that these terms can mean different things to different people, and that misalignment at the definitional level undermines strategic execution.
This precision extends beyond terminology to organizational clarity. Master strategist CEOs like Nadella and Zipse set clear mandates for their strategy organizations, ensuring everyone understands the purpose of what is often an ill-defined and heterogeneous function. This precision with language and purpose isn’t in tension with their adaptability across frameworks. It is a fundamentally empathic approach that unlocks strategic debate, flexibility, and courage in teams.
The Value of Mastering a Craft
Embracing strategy’s craft nature brings several practical benefits for practitioners. First, it liberates us from the often destructive debates about the “one right framework” and instead encourages us to build a repertoire of approaches. Just as Smith’s mastery enabled him to tackle challenges ranging from classical buildings to military fortifications, strategists should aim to develop versatility rather than dogmatic adherence to any single approach.
Second, it refocuses our attention on the importance of experiential learning and pattern recognition. While formal frameworks and tools are valuable, they complement rather than replace the deep understanding that comes from practice. This suggests that strategy design benefits as much from doing — from crafting strategies in real situations — as from studying frameworks in the abstract.
Finally, viewing strategy as a craft encourages appropriate humility about our field. Rather than claiming the settled certainty of a profession, we can acknowledge that strategy work still largely depends on judgment honed through experience. Like master builders of old, we’re practitioners of a craft that combines both art and science, seeking not universal truths but practical wisdom that works in context.
Robert Smith’s legacy reminds us that true mastery transcends any single framework or approach. In strategy, as in architecture of his era, excellence comes not from rigid adherence to one system but from the skilled application of multiple approaches to solve real challenges. That’s not a weakness of the craft of strategy, but its strength.
Yet Smith’s success didn’t just come from his technical versatility. As a master builder who could speak the language of both practical craftsmen and intellectual elites, bridging the Carpenters’ Company and the American Philosophical Society, he understood the power of precise communication across different domains. Similarly, today’s master strategists know that while they must adapt their approaches to different challenges, they must also ensure their organizations share a common understanding of what strategy means and what constitutes excellence in its practice.
As strategy leadership continues to evolve in an increasingly uncertain and complex world, those who approach it as master craftspeople will be best positioned to help their organizations navigate uncertain futures. They will recognize, as all great craftspeople do, that mastery is not about claiming certainty but about continuously honing judgment through practice and reflection.
