Here are eight rules for creating the right conditions for a culture that reflects your creed:

1. Hire the right people

2. Communicate

3. Tend to the weeds

4. Work hard, play hard

5. Be ambitious

6. Celebrate differences 

7. Create the space 

8. Take the long view 

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You’re the boss, but you still spend too much time on the day-to-day. Here’s how to become the strategic leader your company needs.

If you find yourself resisting “being strategic,” because it sounds like a fast track to irrelevance, or vaguely like an excuse to slack off, you’re not alone. Every leader’s temptation is to deal with what’s directly in front, because it always seems more urgent and concrete. Unfortunately, if you do that, you put your company at risk. While you concentrate on steering around potholes, you’ll miss windfall opportunities, not to mention any signals that the road you’re on is leading off a cliff.

Adaptive strategic leaders — the kind who thrive in today’s uncertain environment – do six things well:

1. Anticipate 
2. Think Critically
3. Interpret 
4. Decide
5. Align
6. Learn

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The Wegmans model is simple. A happy, knowledgeable and superbly trained employee creates a better experience for customers. Extraordinary service builds tremendous loyalty. Where, though, is the profit?

High volume, according to company executives. The chain’s stores are enormous – usually 80,000 to 120,000 square feet – larger than a typical Whole Foods and roughly double the size of a traditional supermarket. And they feature a dizzying array of 70,000 products, nearly twice the number available in a standard grocery store. Across the East Coast, Wegmans supermarkets have the highest average daily sales volumes in the industry.

Employees are omnipresent in stores and do seem knowledgeable. With little prompting, they launch into exhaustive but friendly accounts of where the meat, fish or produce they sell hails from, what each item tastes like and how best to prepare it.

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In the digital age, most of today’s young, hot-shot entrepreneurs are working in the world of high tech, specifically in social networking. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams come to mind.

Then there’s Ian Purkayastha, a 19-year old international businessman who’s “networking” the old-fashioned way — face to face — and making a big splash selling and promoting one of the world’s most ancient and low-tech products: Truffles. To be sure, there aren’t billions to be made in truffles, at least not yet. But truffles are by far the most-expensive ingredient in the culinary world, fetching up to $5000 per pound for the most desired varieties.

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