Most existing part in strategy as per your experience(GTM,market entry,transformation,turnaround,sales optimization,cost optimization,pricing,CDD etc)which part in strategy teaches more in business, more interesting, specialised and AI resistant,less crowded,travel oriented?

In my opinion, transformation strategy is the best balance across learning, long-term value, specialization, and AI resistance. You gain exposure to operations, finance, organizational design, technology, change management, and executive decision-making all at once. It teaches you how businesses actually operate end-to-end, not just how to make slides. It also heavily relies on human relationships, stakeholder management, and navigating client politics; all areas that AI, at least in the medium term, will struggle to replace.

Turnaround and cost optimization are also extremely valuable because they force you to deeply understand operational realities and management pressure. They may be less “glamorous,” but they often produce the strongest operators and advisors.

If you want something more specialized, difficult to replace with AI, and still highly relevant globally, I would rank:

1. Transformation
2. Turnaround / Restructuring
3. Operations & Supply Chain Strategy

For travel, transformation and large-scale operational programs usually involve the most on-site client exposure and international work.

Hope it helps,
Franco

Hi Anonymous, that's a good question and it really made me think.

Based on my experience at McKinsey, I believe the best answer is Corporate Finance. The Corporate Finance team deals with everything related to business plans and the review of long-term business strategy.

• It allows you to approach business strategy through hard skills rather than soft skills. You aren't just looking at how to change the customer experience or the go-to-market approach; you are diving into how the actual unit economics of a company change. The truth is, this is what allows you to truly understand how a company works and how its numbers move to generate a profit. You get hands-on with things like the pricing mix and evaluating whether a company has high or low operating leverage.

• It also requires deep reasoning about the balance sheet. Something you often don't learn much about in school, but that is absolutely fundamental to understanding if financial leverage is too high or if an injection of new capital is needed.

• Furthermore, building a 5-year business plan means doing many things at once. It means analyzing the market for market sizing, making strategic choices under uncertainty, understanding how to build forecasts, managing the trade-offs of those forecasts, and constantly reasoning in terms of sensitivity analysis.

Regarding the alternatives, I agree with what others have mentioned about Turnaround and Transformation, but they are sometimes very Project Management oriented, so I didn't enjoy them as much in my experience.

Hope this helps!

Tom

Hi,

Interesting question. Honestly, there’s no single “best” strategy area — each one optimizes for something different. I’ve seen people choose based on learning, exit opportunities, travel, compensation, or lifestyle, and those can point in very different directions.

That said, a few patterns are pretty consistent across the industry.

If your goal is to learn how businesses really work end-to-end, transformation and turnaround projects are probably the richest. You touch operations, finance, organization, incentives, execution, sometimes even culture. They’re messy, but you learn a lot because you see what actually happens after the PowerPoint.

CDDs (commercial due diligences) are great for sharpening business judgment quickly. You see many industries in a short time and learn how investors think. Very steep learning curve, but also very intense and sometimes repetitive over time.

Pricing is one of the more underrated areas in my opinion. It’s specialized, analytical, closely tied to value creation, and relatively harder to commoditize. Strong pricing people are usually quite valuable.

GTM and sales optimization can also be excellent, especially if you enjoy commercial topics and client interaction. They tend to be practical and implementation-oriented.

On the AI-resistance point: the safer areas are usually the ones requiring stakeholder management, ambiguous decision-making, and organizational execution. AI will probably automate parts of analysis and research before it replaces someone leading a transformation across multiple business units.

“Less crowded” usually means more specialized. Pricing, procurement, transformation execution, and some operational strategy niches tend to have fewer people than general strategy.

Travel-wise, implementation/transformation projects historically involved more travel than pure strategy work, although post-COVID this depends heavily on the firm and office.

Personally, I’d choose based less on “future-proofing” and more on:

• what type of problems energize you
• whether you prefer strategic thinking vs operational execution
• whether you like breadth or specialization

Because long-term, people usually become best at the work they genuinely enjoy doing.

Best,

Soheil

Others have given good specific answers on individual topics.
From my perspective, it is less about picking the most interesting or AI resistant topic and more about a different skill set entirely. The real value in strategy comes from being able to walk into any ambiguous business problem, structure it well, and drive it through to outcomes by collaborating with your team and clients. That capability is what makes a strong strategy professional, regardless of the topic.
The specific topic also matters less than you think because over a career you will end up working across many of them. Transformation today, pricing next year, market entry the year after. The skill that compounds is the structured thinking and the ability to lead through ambiguity.