IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/27952.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

How Do CEOs Make Strategy?

Author

Listed:
  • Mu-Jeung Yang
  • Michael Christensen
  • Nicholas Bloom
  • Raffaella Sadun
  • Jan Rivkin

Abstract

We explore the critical question of how executives make strategic decisions. Utilizing a new survey of 262 CEO alumni of Harvard Business School, we gather evidence on four aspects of each executive’s business strategy: its overall structure, its formalization, its development, and its implementation. We report three key results. First, different CEOs use markedly different processes to make strategic decisions; some follow highly formalized, rigorous, and deliberate processes, while others rely heavily on instinct and intuition. Second, more structured strategy processes are associated with larger firm size and faster employment growth. Third, using a regression discontinuity centered around a change in the curriculum of Harvard Business School’s required strategy course, we trace differences in strategic decision making back to differences in managerial education.

Suggested Citation

  • Mu-Jeung Yang & Michael Christensen & Nicholas Bloom & Raffaella Sadun & Jan Rivkin, 2020. "How Do CEOs Make Strategy?," NBER Working Papers 27952, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27952
    Note: PR
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w27952.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • L2 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior
    • M1 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration
    • M2 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Economics

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27952. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.