Strategic intent: The literature, the construct and its role in predicting organization performance

Strong performing companies often have intents that state their ambitions for the future and this will be clearly communicated to stakeholders by the chief executive officer. The chief executive officer should lead company strategy and play the key role in establishing and communicating the strategic intent. This conceptual paper uses insights mainly from the strategy process and corporate governance literature to build better understanding of how a business can achieve a strong sense of strategic intent to inform their strategy work. Three dimensions of the strategic intent construct are identified – shared vision, resource focus and foresight. Through the development of a series of research propositions a substantial future research agenda is offered in an area where the literature is quite limited. Points of interest to the strategy practice field are also discussed.