Strategy at Scale: Making Strategy Work as Organizations Grow
Strategy at Scale
Making Strategy Work as Organizations Grow
As organizations scale, strategy changes.
What once worked as founder intuition, informal alignment, or annual planning starts to break down. Complexity increases. Decisions slow. Teams pull in different directions. And leaders begin to sense that strategy exists—but isn’t fully working.
This roundtable focuses on a core challenge many organizations face as they grow:
how strategy evolves from ideas and analysis into clear commitments that actually guide decisions at scale.
Because at scale, strategy is no longer just about insight.
It’s about focus, credibility, and traction.
Why Strategy Breaks at Scale
Many organizations respond to growth by creating a strategy function or strategy office. But too often, that function struggles to define its role:
Is strategy a plan, a process, or a service function?
Is it meant to advise, decide, or coordinate?
How does it earn credibility beyond producing decks and frameworks?
When those questions aren’t answered explicitly, strategy risks becoming reactive, ambiguous, or disconnected from real decisions.
This session explores what changes when strategy is treated not as a plan—but as a set of deliberate commitments tied to a clear end state.
🎙️ This Month’s Speaker: Adam Zalisk
Adam leads corporate strategy at Amplify, a pioneer in K–12 education serving more than 10 million students across all 50 U.S. states.
Before stepping into his current role, Adam held leadership positions across operations, product, partnerships, and implementation at Amplify, including serving as COO of its K–5 literacy portfolio. Earlier in his career, he led innovation efforts at Harlem Children’s Zone and was a founding member of Booz & Company’s North American education practice.
🔍What This Session Focuses On
This is not a conversation about strategic planning cycles or frameworks.
It’s about what strategy is actually hired to do as organizations grow—and how strategy leaders can avoid becoming internal order-takers.
Drawing from Adam’s experience, we’ll explore:
Why strategy offices emerge in the first place—and what problem they’re really meant to solve
How ambiguity around strategic commitments undermines execution at scale
Where strategy functions most often lose (or earn) credibility
How strategy can act as connective tissue between insight, leadership intent, and execution
🗓️ Agenda
🔹 Introductions & Context – What changes when organizations scale—and why strategy often struggles
🔹 Talk & Insights from Adam Zalisk – Strategy as Commitment: Lessons from Scaling Organizations
🔹 Peer Discussion – Where strategy functions add clarity, and where they lose traction
🔹 Q&A and Takeaways – Applying these insights to your own strategy and growth challenges
If you’re navigating growth, rising complexity, or questions about the real role of strategy at scale, we invite you to join the conversation alongside peers tackling these same challenges across organizations.