My agenda revolves around one central question: how strategic thinking works — how strategists sequence consequential decisions under uncertainty, and how that capacity is developed.

My agenda rests on a simple conviction: strategy is not only about choosing what to do, but about knowing what to do first, what to defer, what to preserve, and when to commit. It is a skill exercised over time, and one that can be strengthened.

This leads me to two broad problems.

Sequencing

The first is to understand how strategists use sequencing to navigate consequential decisions under uncertainty. Firms, entrepreneurs, investors, and competitors rarely make all choices at once. They stage commitments, delay certain moves, accelerate others, experiment, reposition, and preserve optionality until better information arrives.

My research asks: when does this kind of sequencing improve performance, and when does it fail? When is delay strategic rather than merely passive? When does early commitment create advantage, and when does it lock firms into the wrong path? More broadly, how do strategists use the ordering of decisions to shape outcomes when the future is uncertain?

Strategy Education and Strategic Thinking

The second is to understand how strategy education can translate into better strategic thinking among students of business. I view this as a problem of strengthening critical thinking: helping students move beyond the memorization of frameworks toward the disciplined practice of reasoning through complex strategic situations.

This problem has become even more important in the age of AI. As analytical tools become more powerful and more widely available, the distinctive value of business education will depend increasingly on whether students can ask better questions, structure ambiguous problems, evaluate tradeoffs, and make thoughtful judgments under uncertainty.

How I Am Addressing These Problems

First, I use large-scale data on startups to examine how young firms sequence developmental milestones such as financing, customer validation, adaptation, and growth. Startups provide a salient empirical setting because early strategic choices are made under severe uncertainty, resource constraints, and shifting external evaluation, and because the ordering of these choices is consequential, and increasingly observable at scale through new data.

Second, I develop pedagogical approaches that bring strategic reasoning into the classroom. My goal is to design teaching methods that help students practice strategy as a form of disciplined reasoning: identifying the problem, considering alternatives, anticipating responses, sequencing actions, and learning from feedback.