Nine. You are reading. Reports, numbers, three competitors’ pricing pages. It looks like doing nothing and it is most of the value.
Eleven. A meeting where a decision was supposed to be made. It is not made. It is deferred to a meeting next week that will contain the same people and the same information.
Midday. You write one page. Not ten — one. The discipline is deciding what to leave out, knowing you will be asked about exactly the thing you cut.
Two. Someone senior disagrees with your recommendation, based on an instinct they cannot fully articulate. They may well be right. Their instinct contains twenty years of things that are not in your spreadsheet.
Four. The decision goes the other way. Your job now is to make that direction work as well as it possibly can, without sulking, because the alternative is to be the person who was right once and is never asked again.
What you are actually judged on
Whether the thing you recommended still looks sensible in a year. That is a long feedback loop, and you have to make peace with it or you will optimise for sounding clever in the meeting instead — which is a real and common failure.
What wears you down
Watching a good analysis lose to a confident opinion. It will happen often enough that you learn to package the analysis as a story, which feels like a compromise and is actually the skill.
Who thrives
People who want the thing to be correct more than they want the credit for it, and who can say I was wrong in a room without it costing them anything internally.
Who leaves
People who need to be seen to be right. Strategy is the least public of these jobs. If the recommendation works, the operator gets the credit — and that is the correct outcome. If that sentence stung, it is worth sitting with, because it does not stop being true at any seniority.
Your hour: take a company you know well. Write one page: what they should stop doing. Not what they should start — anyone can add. Naming what to kill, and what it costs to kill it, is the actual work.