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Foreword
My issue is that strategy is notoriously difficult to explain.
Think "Strategist" and you might picture someone with a slide deck, but no one’s quite sure what’s on the screen. Before I began, I thought strategy poured out of brilliant minds in perfect, captivating answers. I thought a strategist could be asked a question, pause, and conjure the solution.
It couldn’t be different. Strategy isn’t ask, ponder, solve. It’s ask, discuss, research, wander, concept, discuss, test, refine, destroy, build, refine, deploy. It’s a process as creative as any—iterative, logical, messy, and demanding of discipline.
Until my early 20s, I had no idea strategy was a viable career path. That changed when I witnessed my first strategy presentation: Fresh thinking, clearly laid out. A room stunned into clarity. It was a gateway drug that made one thing obvious: I wanted to do this work, but didn’t know how.
No one else seemed to know what strategy actually was either. It was an authority reserved for the tenured — something you earned only after years of doing something else. Experience first, strategy later. But I wasn’t willing to wait, so I made an important decision:
I won’t wait for permission to do the work.
Why are we doing this?
Every answer led me deeper into an craft I had yet to learn. And eventually that questioning led me to a job at a storied innovation consultancy in New York. Within days, I went from self-taught to sitting in rooms with executives at Google, Grubhub, LiveNation, Pepsi, and more. What surprised me still, even at the highest levels, was the lack of documented process for strategic and creative thinking.
But maybe it shouldn’t have been surprising. Creativity hides behind instinct — a thousand tiny judgments built through years of trial and error. That’s why the work of a strategist still carries an air of mystery: You either "have it" or you don’t. You’re either lucky enough to learn it through proximity, or you’re not.
That’s why this manual exists.
Operating Logic is my attempt to make the intangible practice of strategy tangible. To bottle what I learned the hard way into a system that others can use immediately. A system rooted in creativity, but disciplined by structure. A way of thinking that helps you routinely move from uncertainty to clarity.
I haven’t cracked a sacred code. But I have built a real process — one that lets me think for a living and sit in rooms my younger self could have never imagined entering.
Not because of credentials. Not because of bravado. But because I know how to find the problem and build a path forward. And that’s what I want for you. Not answers — but agency. The ability to walk into an unknown situation and trust that you have the tools to navigate it.
How to use this:
01 Read it once (should take an hour)
02 Mark what’s helpful
03 Reference as needed
04 Email g@garrettherzik.com with your hate mail
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”
—François Auguste De Chateaubriand