We can understand the organization's strategy by asking the following questions: 

• What are the organization's major strategic objectives right now?
• What is our organization already great at? What to improve? 
• What is our organization's weakness? We plan to do and not do? 
• What are the major needs, challenges, and opportunities we face over the next six months? Year? In the long term?
• How does my team fit into this picture? 
• What are my group's role and top priorities in carrying out this strategy? 
• How can I communicate the strategy to my team?

When listening to leaders explain their vision and objectives, we can use these answers to gain deep insights.  Additionally, you would use your own observation to spotting the strategic changes. 

After leaders present the new organizational vision, they are likely to pause and ask if there are any questions. In this situation, you don't want to keep silent. It's a great opportunity to interact and engage in the conversation. Let me give you a few questions you can ask in this situation:

• What are the changes from our previous vision? Why do we need to change? Do we have any specific challenges we'd like to address now? Any suggestions or plans on how to adapt to change? 
  These safety questions allow leaders to elaborate on the decisions and talk about changes. From the follow-up with the question, we can also find out why changes are needed and what each individual needs to adapt to align with the organization's goals.
• Are there any risks associated with our vision?
  Any decision has risks. Listening to leadership's risk assessment can determine the execution process. For example, the leader's vision is to build strong customer relationships, learning, innovation, and operational efficiency. Risks may exist in conflicting priorities between innovation and customer needs. If this is a projected risk, we can create a steering committee to prioritize requests.
• What does our team's success look like?
  ​This is another way of interpreting vision. This question allows leaders to connect their idea to the team's expectations.

Asking the right questions is crucial for success. Prepare to gain insights, build relationships, and advance your career by asking questions.​

The case interview is a type of interview used by management consulting where the interviewers work with the candidates to solve business problems. The interview questions may vary from addressing organization profitability issues, analyzing the possibility of a merger and acquisition (M&A), and evaluating a new market entry. Case interviews do not emphasize the result but the problem-solving process, including clarifying and defining the problem, business judgment, decomposing the situation with the MECE (Mutual Exclusivity and Collective Exhaustion) method, and structuring the case to find the root causes. 

We can learn and practice our business skills by studying these interview questions. ​ Let's look at some examples.

Example 1: Profitability Case 
A restaurant called Pizza Hut has had a falling profit recently. How can you help? This is a profitability case. To solve this type of case [1] [3], we need to start with the profit=revenue-cost formula and analyze the company's revenue and cost. Breaking down the issue into revenue and cost is the MECE approach (Mutually exclusive and collectively exhausted). The analysis is followed by creating a hypothesis-driven issue tree. Because the question asks about a failing profit, the problem must either be a revenue drop or cost increases. 

• If it is a revenue drop, we need to analyze if the decline is caused by external or internal reasons. External reasons include an economic downturn, competition, lawsuits, or government regulations. The internal reasons can reside in a lack of supply (the value chain problem), the quality (product) causing the customer to pick up other choices, or the delivery problem. Again, all these breakdowns are based on the MECE principle. 
• If the problem is a cost problem, we need to know if the cost comes from a product or non-product area and drill down until the root causes are identified. 

After the root cause analysis, a proposal can be given based on creative thinking, knowing the clients, and being mindful of politics. For example, if we find out the profit drop is because of the burger quality drop due to the suppliers failing to timely shipping bread to local stores. We then need to find out if we can find alternative suppliers or work with suppliers to avoid future delays. ​
The solution presentation can start with explaining the problem and the root causes and end with providing the solution and a risk management strategy. 

Example 2: Operation Case - HR Cost Reduction 
An HR department needs to reduce its cost. How can you help? (HR - Cost Reduction) Cost reduction requires starting with listing all the costs, where the cost can be divided into fixed or variable costs. Fix vs. variable costs are related to if the cost is relevant to the number of people in the department. Fix costs can be training costs, law department, and recruiting costs. The variable cost can be labor costs, including salary, bonus, and benefits. The labor cost saving means lowering the headcount by examining the manager and employee ratio [6]. 

Example 3: ROI Investment Assessment
 Is building a new train construction investment from the airport to downtown worthwhile with grater than 15% profit? (ROI) 
The ROI cases [4] require assessing the investment and returns. The central part is the return which is the project's profit, that is, revenue minus cost. 

• To estimate the revenue, we need to know the number of passengers and the ticket prices. The ticket prices can refer to the cost of taking a taxi or bus to the city. The number of passengers can be based on the total number of in/out airport people multiplied by the percentile willing to take the train rather than taking their car, taxi, or bus. 
• The costs consider the construction (CAPEX) and maintenance costs (OPEX). ​

Example 4: (Operation - Cost Reduction) 
An IT department is looking at reducing the cost with contractors. How can you help? 
​We would check the project and nonproject costs for contractor cost reduction. 

• Project-related cost: For project cost, we would evaluate the competency of the candidates, the skillset demands, and resource allocation optimization. We need to decide what project requires, how to plan project to best leverage resources, assess the skills and competency to reduce redundancy, streamline onboarding/off-boarding process, and access turn-over impacts.
• Non-Project related cost: For nonproject related cost,  we would look at optimizing or automating the contractor hiring and management process. 

We can practice case interviews to improve business analysis skills and the ability to make sound business judgments. ​