The Power of Strategic Centering

In a dematerializing economy—where value has shifted from physical assets to intangibles such as data, software, and capabilities—traditional strategy frameworks no longer provide enough guidance. Organizations need a clear center: a single, coherent organizing principle that defines what they are really about. A strategic center guides resource allocation, opportunity selection, and organizational identity. Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath draws on real-world examples to show how companies that choose and commit to a center—whether it’s around a mission, a customer, a technology, a regional or national ecosystem, or friction erasure—gain clarity, speed, and coherence while reducing internal politics and paralysis. Effective centering is not about rigid positioning, she explains, but about choosing the dimension along which a company will pursue coherent opportunity sets as industries and old strategic anchors dissolve.

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