Strategy and the Strategist: How it Matters Who Develops the Strategy

32 Pages Posted: 25 Jan 2014 Last revised: 13 Dec 2019

See all articles by Eric Van den Steen

Eric Van den Steen

Harvard Business School - Strategy Unit

Date Written: July 2, 2016

Abstract

This paper addresses primarily two questions. First, when or why should a company’s strategy be developed by its CEO versus by some outside analyst or other insider? Second, how does strategy, properly defined, interact with vision (in the sense of a strong belief) about various decisions? In the process, the paper also identifies three new criteria that make a decision strategic and derives two new explanations why strategies often reflect the background of the strategist. The paper studies these questions using a (new) functional definition of strategy as ‘the smallest set of choices to optimally guide the other choices.’ With regard to the first question – when or why should a company’s strategy be developed by its CEO – the paper shows that strategy formulation by the CEO (or by a strategist with control over the right decisions) leads to both a better strategy and better execution when the strategic decision is controversial. With regard to the second question, the paper shows that a strategist’s vision (as a strong belief) may improve implementation, but only if two conditions are met: the strong belief must be about a strategic decision and that decision must be controlled by the strategist. Vision about non-strategic decisions may in fact hurt the strategy’s implementation.

Suggested Citation

van den Steen, Eric, Strategy and the Strategist: How it Matters Who Develops the Strategy (July 2, 2016). Harvard Business School Strategy Unit Working Paper No. 17-002, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2383972 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2383972

Eric Van den Steen (Contact Author)

Harvard Business School - Strategy Unit ( email )

Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field Road
Boston, MA 02163
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
897
Abstract Views
4,911
Rank
48,886
PlumX Metrics