How Do Chief Executive Officers Make Strategy?
Mu-Jeung Yang, Michael Christensen, Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, Jan Rivkin
Management Science · 2026 · Volume 72 · Issue 6
Abstract
We survey 262 chief executive officer (CEO) alumni of Harvard Business School and gather evidence on three aspects of each executive’s strategy practice: how formalized it is, how it is developed, and how it is implemented. We report three main results. First, firms with higher adoption of structured strategy practices outperform their peers; they grow faster and are more profitable, especially in industries with greater strategic complexity. Second, the appointment of CEOs with more structured styles appears to drive this outperformance, not firm-specific effects. This raises the question of how an executive comes to adopt more structured strategy practices. Our third finding provides a partial answer; business education can have a lasting impact on a CEO’s strategy practices as evidenced by a regression discontinuity analysis centered around a curriculum change at Harvard Business School. This paper was accepted by Alfonso Gambardella, business strategy. Funding: Financial support was provided by Harvard Business School. M.-J. Yang acknowledges financial support provided by the Leeds School of Business. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.03924 .
Keywords
strategy, management, productivity, CEO
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