Business
Steven Lovett’s Guide to Turning Executives Into Strategic Assets
Steven Lovett, founder and CEO of Principled Consulting Services (PCS), has spent decades helping executives shift from operational excellence to strategic advantage.
His work, culminating in his book “StrategIQ Mindset,” focuses on helping C-suite leaders build lasting strategic advantage rather than simply managing operational efficiency. In this Q&A, Lovett discusses the invisible mistakes executives make, why traditional consulting falls short, and how Principled Consulting Services (PCS) rewires leadership cognition to deliver real, measurable transformation.
Q: You’ve said that many companies are not losing because they underperform but because they over-optimize the wrong things. Can you explain?
Lovett: Many organizations relentlessly improve metrics, processes, and dashboards that are easy to measure, while neglecting the harder work of building future capabilities and positioning. Operations may run tightly, KPIs look strong, and short-term wins accumulate, but the company becomes unfit for tomorrow’s challenges.
When a company is “over-optimizing the wrong things,” you typically see a high ratio of near-term improvement projects (process improvement, cost-cutting, incremental feature work) to long-term transformation projects (new capabilities, new business models, new markets), often with transformation falling below 30% of major initiatives. You also see executive time dominated by operational topics; less than about 40% of executive meeting time is spent on forward-looking capability building, portfolio bets, and strategic repositioning.
Q: At what point did you realize that traditional strategy models weren’t solving the real executive problem anymore?
Lovett: I noticed a pattern across industries: executive teams spent months crafting strategic plans that never changed daily operations. Even with polished plans, M&A targets, differentiation strategies, or cost restructuring, strategic plans and visions rarely materialized as intended.
For me, the true realization crystallized a couple of years ago when I recognized the pattern wasn’t industry-specific. A CEO in healthcare would describe decision-making paralysis in nearly identical terms as a manufacturing executive or university president. Different sectors, different market pressures, but the same underlying problem: senior-level executives lacked a coherent strategic vision in alignment with their strongest, core business activities and their external environment. Their strategies presented compelling visions without coherent logic connecting choices to outcomes. They ignored fundamental constraints and didn’t solve for competing interests.
The problem wasn’t the models themselves but that executives lacked the cognitive tools to translate strategy into executable decisions under pressure. They followed playbooks and executed operational elements well but felt “stuck” strategically.
Q: What is the most common “invisible mistake” you see executive teams making today that looks like good management but is actually strategic erosion?
Lovett: Executive teams often fall into a destructive paradox: management practices that look exemplary on the surface steadily erode strategic progress. Inclusive decision-making, comprehensive planning, and disciplined execution can create the appearance of sound leadership while quietly weakening competitive position. This invisible mistake most often appears as consensus-driven decision-making combined with an obsession with operational excellence. Teams optimize current business models using today’s best practices while largely ignoring future conditions and true strategic innovation.
Executives often equate collaboration and rigor with good strategy. They debate priorities, gather broad input, produce detailed plans, and track metrics that boards readily approve. But consensus-driven planning turns strategy into long lists of initiatives, avoids hard trade-offs, and slows innovation, allowing competitors willing to make fewer, riskier choices to pull ahead.
This pattern culminates in what appears to be disciplined management but is actually strategic myopia. Leaders concentrate on near-term efficiency while overlooking market shifts, emerging technologies, changing customer expectations, and competitive threats. Operational performance improves, but strategic position steadily deteriorates.
Q: Could you give an example of how PCS approaches this differently?
Lovett: Unlike traditional firms that provide static recommendations, PCS explicitly rebuilt the model around co-creating strategy and execution with the leadership team, rather than advising from the sidelines. Using frameworks like StrategIQ Mindset™ and the Agincourt Principle™, executives learn to weigh trade-offs, anticipate stakeholder responses, and make decisions aligned with both strategy and operational realities. This hands-on approach ensures strategies are actionable and that leaders develop the mental models to apply them independently over time.
Because the firm stays in the arena with the executives—through decision audits, scenario work, and coaching—it can help leaders adjust in real time as conditions change, rather than leaving them with a static plan that quickly diverges from reality.
Rebuilding the consulting model is important because the legacy model was built to deliver insight, while modern organizations fail or win on embedded decision capability and execution discipline.
Q: You describe PCS as rewiring executive cognition rather than “improving leadership.” What does that mean in practice?
Lovett: PCS works on how executive leaders think about strategy, risk, and decisions in real time—not just by adding new tips, leadership behaviors, or aspirational advice. Traditional leadership work tries to make executives nicer, clearer, or more inspiring. PCS’s StrategIQ Mindset™ is built to change the mental models driving their choices.
Most executive teams operate inside “invisible boundaries” about markets, customers, competitors, and internal capability that are accepted because they’re familiar, not because they’re true. PCS forces those boundaries to be named, challenged, and, where needed, discarded. Strategically intelligent executives learn to separate urgent operational noise from truly strategic issues, allowing meeting time and resources to shift away from near-term, marginal gains toward shaping a durable future. Instead of defaulting to “How do we fix X?” teams are retrained to ask, “What strategic advantage could we create here?”
In practice, this happens through structured strategy sessions, real-time decision audits, and applied coaching that focuses on how leaders frame issues, sequence questions, and weigh evidence. Over time, these repeated cognitive shifts change the default way executives perceive, interpret, and choose—making strategic thinking instinctive and strategy far more executable without simply trying harder.
Q: What is “decision velocity,” and why is it important?
Lovett: Decision velocity is how quickly an executive team moves from a clear signal to committed, well-aligned action—and learns from it—without sacrificing judgment quality. PCS treats it as a property of the team, not the personality of a “decisive” CEO.
It includes three elements:
- Cycle time: How long it takes from signal (market shift, risk, performance insight) to a clear decision with owner and deadline.
- Decision quality and durability: Decisions should hold without constant rework or hidden vetoes.
- Speed to action and feedback: How quickly actions start and data returns to refine or reverse choices.
PCS embeds decision velocity into executive rhythms. Meetings end with visible ledgers: which decisions were made, by whom, by when, and triggers for revisit. Teams track cycle times for capital allocation, hiring, product bets, and strategic entry/exit. This turns KPIs into “if X, then Y within Z days” rules instead of passive dashboards.
Three forces make decision velocity a top-tier metric: volatility punishes slow movers, most KPIs are descriptive not controlling, and boards increasingly track time-to-adjust as a resilience proxy. PCS sees decision velocity sitting alongside growth, profitability, and engagement as a meta-metric: it determines how fast any other metric can be improved or defended. High decision velocity allows rapid pivoting, capital reallocation, and competitive adaptation.
Q: You have an upcoming book that challenges how leaders think about strategy itself. What central question does it aim to answer?
Lovett: The central question “The StrategIQ Mindset” aims to answer is simple but existentially challenging for senior-level executives: Are you building the organizational capacity to win competitions you can’t yet fully articulate, or are you merely improving current systems designed for battles you’ve already fought?
This question forces executives to confront the gap between their actual value as “strategic assets” and their perceived value as “uber-managers.” It distinguishes between running the business versus creating it, activity versus legacy, and job description versus hiring directive.
The book asks: “When you leave your role, will your organization be more capable of strategic thinking and adaptation, or will you have simply been an excellent administrator of inherited systems?”
Many executives never ask this, assuming operational excellence equals strategic leadership. They focus on what’s measurable now, ignoring what’s consequential long-term. The book’s frameworks, case studies, and exercises guide them to answer honestly—and act—before the market renders operational brilliance irrelevant.
Q: You’re also launching an executive course on March 17. What gap does this fill that most leadership programs completely miss?
Most executive programs emphasize self-awareness, leadership style, and interpersonal effectiveness. They often promise insights, enhanced leadership capacity, and aspirational guidance, but deliver few hard, enterprise-level results. PCS’s Strategic Intelligence: The Executive Program for Profitability and Market Dominance is different. It develops executives into strategic assets, not simply better managers, capable of designing and executing their organization’s unique competitive advantage.
Over six weeks, participants implement 11 practical orientations to become strategically intelligent executives. Every session produces tangible deliverables—Executive Delta Map, Strategic Pattern Map, Pyramid Inversion Plan, and a fully integrated StrategIQ Playbook—paired with applied tools like the Pattern vs Process diagnostic, Three-Horizon Constraint Map, and FITREP dashboard. Leaders are guided to redesign mandates, team structures, time use, metrics, and power coalitions around competitive advantage, producing work that is immediately real-world ready.
Traditional executive education or coaching delivers generic frameworks or behavioral guidance. Business school programs teach what great strategy looks like; coaching helps executives become better leaders. Few provide tools to convert operational excellence into strategic capability-building, measure progress, or embed an actionable operating system. PCS fills that gap with structured sessions, rolling transformation cycles, and mandate clarity that translate knowledge into enterprise-level impact.
The course is designed for two groups: sitting C-suite executives seeking to move from operational stewardship to strategic insurgency, and high-potential leaders preparing for first-time C-suite roles. It is not designed for mid-level managers, directors, or administrators whose focus remains on day-to-day operational performance.
Q: What is the biggest strategic mistake you see companies making today?
Lovett: Many will regret mistaking strong management for strategic leadership. Margins may rise while customers shift to alternatives. KPIs stay green, yet organizations become “more efficient but less adaptable,” celebrating cost reductions while decision cycles slow and teams opt for safe, incremental moves.
This is the Irrelevance Trap: companies optimize for markets that no longer exist. Kodak mastered film. BlackBerry perfected keyboards. Blockbuster optimized stores. All excelled at what customers no longer valued. Internal voices drown out external realities, stability feels like strength, and competitors converge on identical operations.
In a few years, many will see they spent most resources on today while competitors invested in the future. Executives focus on operational reviews, achieving parity while rivals capture differentiation. The regret: “We had the resources and saw the signals, but we couldn’t break free from optimizing the present. By the time we realized operational excellence wasn’t strategy, competitors had already repositioned.” The companies that will win are already building strategic capacity to bend and transcend while competitors optimize themselves toward obsolescence. But PCS wants to help other companies get there. Our clarion call is: Challenge the Present. Begin to Win
Lovett’s work highlights a shift in executive development: success requires cognitive rewiring and integrated strategy design, not just operational mastery. PCS embeds with leadership teams to make decisions faster, smarter, and more aligned with long-term competitive advantage. For boards and C-suite executives facing disruption, the lesson is clear: the future belongs to organizations that build strategic capacity today, not those perfecting yesterday’s metrics.
Written by: Shem Albert
