How Do Chief Executive Officers Make Strategy?

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.