Forthcoming
Article
Management Science

How Do Chief Executive Officers Make Strategy?

By: Mu-Jeung Yang, Michael Christensen, Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and Jan Rivkin

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.

Keywords

Management Practices and Processes; Strategy; Business Education

Citation

Yang, Mu-Jeung, Michael Christensen, Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, and Jan Rivkin. "How Do Chief Executive Officers Make Strategy?" Management Science (forthcoming). (Pre-published online September 26, 2025.)