Why Most CEOs Are Bad at Strategy

A blog post by Roger Martin* makes a good case that CEOs find it hard to simultaneously make a good choice of where to play and how to win. He concludes they need to go beyond these basics and ‘creatively integrate’ these two views. True enough if performance were all about formulating strategy, but it forgets that order-of-magnitude differences in performance more often arise from relentless expert management of strategy, than from unique choices of where+how to play. 

He also claims that we do not have the tools to integrate these perspectives – which is not true, of course, because that’s what strategy dynamics does.

* Dean of the Rotman School of Management