CONCEPT
Strategic Imagination
The cognitive capacity Ohmae's framework identifies as the scarce and decisive variable of the AI age — the ability to see the competitive system whole, identify what is worth building, and direct amplified capability toward genuine value creation.
Strategic imagination is not vision in the platitudinous sense. It is the specific cognitive capacity to hold the entire competitive system in mind — corporation, customer, competitor, in dynamic interaction — and to perceive an opening that sequential analysis would not reveal. Ohmae argued for four decades that this capacity was the single most valuable strategic resource. In the AI age, it has become the only strategic resource whose value is not being commoditized, because every other input to strategic action — analysis, execution, implementation — can now be performed by AI tools available to every competitor. What remains exclusively human is the imagination that decides where the amplified capability is aimed.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The capacity cannot be systematized. Ohmae insisted throughout his career that strategic imagination cannot be reduced to a methodology that any competent analyst could follow. It can be cultivated through practice, informed by analysis, and disciplined by