I get this question constantly.

From students eight months into their first pharma role. From consultants who've been executing flawlessly for two years and want something more. From early-career professionals who look around the room in a strategy meeting and wonder when, exactly, they get to have a seat at the table.

"How do I get more involved in strategy?"

My answer is always the same: you already are.

What they don't understand — what nobody tells them — is that they are not waiting to become instruments of strategy. They already are the instruments. They're just wielding themselves without knowing it.

If this were war, they'd be the people making the swords and reloading the guns — arming every rank, every soldier in the field. The generals get the credit. The logistics chain wins the battle.

Here's the version nobody puts in a textbook.

Strategy is not a title. It's not a PowerPoint with a 2×2 matrix and a synergy bubble. It is not something you unlock at Senior Director.

Strategy is knowing, exhaustively, every way a product commercialization can go wrong — and preparing for those failures before they happen.

That's it. Write down every inflection point where something can break. Every choke point. Every landmine three to five years out. Map them. Then figure out which ones are yours to defuse with evidence and value stories. Then build a plan to defuse them.

Plan for every screw-up. Execute to perfection. Avoid most of them. Manage through the few that don't.

The only difference between an execution professional and a strategic one is that the second person is doing this in their head before they're asked to. Proactively. Without permission.

Here's how to make this concrete.

You're touching a $2 million RWE book of work? People are counting on you to give them something they can message to a customer. You are already strategically consequential — you just haven't connected the dots yet.

A $10 million book of work? You are accountable for higher-order solutions: access, formulary positioning, peer-to-peer pull-through. Every study you prioritize and every study you deprioritize is a strategic choice.

A $50 million book of work? Your job is one crisis after another. And the work had better still land on time, because it is literally your neck on the line.

The scale changes. The fundamental job — knowing where the product can fail and having something ready to counter it — does not.

I want to be direct: being strategic is a choice. Not a promotion. Not a title change. A choice you have the opportunity, and frankly the obligation, to make from the day you step into this field.

Start with the simplest possible version. Write a list. If I am working on this asset, what are the ten ways payers push back in year three? What are the ways a competitor publishes something that undercuts our messaging? What does our field team walk into when the HCP asks the question we don't have a clean answer for?

Now ask: which of those is mine to solve?

That list — that exhaustive, unglamorous, non-buzzword list — is your strategy. The evidence plan flows from it. The evidence flows from the plan. And when you arm your field colleagues to message to within an inch of their customer, that is you winning strategy.

It was never magic dust.

It's just knowing where the bodies are buried — before they are.

Sidebar with Sanket meets once every month, typically the fourth Friday . Free. Live. Office hours for HEOR professionals who don't have a Sanket in their corner.

— Sanket