clair015

When Laura d’Andrea Tyson was the Dean of London Business School – some years ago – she put together a committee to examine and reformulate the School’s strategy. Several professors sat on that committee. When I once asked her, having a drink at her home, why none of them were Strategy professors, she looked at me for about 5 seconds baffled. Eventually, she stammered, “yes, perhaps we could consider that in the future….”. It was clear to me, from her stunned silence (and she wasn’t easily lost for words), that she had never even considered the thought before. I, in contrast, thought it wasn’t such an alien idea; putting some strategy professors on the School’s strategy-making committee. We had – and still have – people in our Strategy department (e.g. Costas Markides , Sumantra Ghoshal ) who not only had dozens of top academic publications behind their names but who also had an eager ear amongst strategy practitioners, through their Harvard Business Review publications and hundreds o...

Stevie Spring, who recently stepped down after a successful stint as CEO of Future plc , the specialty magazine publisher, once told me, “I am not really the company’s CEO; what I really am is its Chief Story Teller.” What she meant is that she believed that telling a story was her most important task as a CEO. Actually, she insisted, her job was to tell the same story over and over again. And when she said ‘a story’, she meant that her job was to tell her representation of the company’s strategy: the direction she wanted to take the business and how that was going to make it prosper and survive. She felt that a good CEO should tell that kind of story repeatedly, to all employees, shareholders, fund managers and analysts. For, indeed, a good strategy does tell a story. All successful CEOs whom I have seen were great storytellers. Not necessarily because of their oratorical skills, but because the characteristics of the strategy they had put together lent themselves to being told like a...