HBR’s classic case for the Chief Strategy Officer is resurfacing — and nearly two decades on, it’s still half right. The half it misses is the reason most strategies still fail.
An article from the October 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review has been doing the rounds again, and for good reason. In “The Chief Strategy Officer,” three Accenture authors dismantled the myth of the strategist as a long-range planner working in elegant isolation.
The CSOs they studied were doers first; seasoned operators charged with clarifying strategy for every function, driving immediate change, and sustaining the decision-making that keeps an organisation aligned. The image that has stuck with readers for nearly twenty years is the executive who can walk into any office and say: “What we’re doing isn’t in line with the company’s strategy — and we need to fix that.”
It’s a powerful image. It’s also, in 2026, a dangerously incomplete one.
Because here’s what I’ve learned in more than two decades advising CEOs and executive teams on innovation-led growth: the organisations that grow through innovation are never the ones that found a single guardian for their strategy. They’re the ones that stopped believing any single person could guard it at all.
What the article got right, and what the world changed
The 2007 argument was ahead of its time in one crucial respect: it recognised that strategy divorced from execution is fiction. A pure strategist producing beautiful documents that describe things the organisation cannot actually do is not doing strategy. They’re doing literature.
That insight has aged perfectly. What hasn’t aged is the operating context. In 2007, a strategy could still plausibly be an annual exercise i.e., set the direction, cascade the plan, and ride herd on the change effort.
Today, the environment shifts faster than any planning cycle can accommodate. Markets reconfigure mid-year. Technologies, AI most obviously, redraw competitive boundaries in quarters, not decades.
The recent discussion around the article makes the same point from several directions: strategy can no longer be a presentation deck or a planning ritual. It has to be a living process.
And, given the complexity of the operating environment we’re in today, that living process cannot live in one office.
The authority problem nobody talks about
Look again at that famous image; the executive who can walk into any room and challenge misaligned decisions. Ask yourself, what actually makes that moment work?
It isn’t the job title. I’ve watched organisations appoint strategy chiefs with impeccable mandates who changed precisely nothing, because the moment they walked out of the room, the culture quietly voted against them. People nodded, agreed, and carried on doing what the incentives, habits and unspoken rules had always rewarded. The challenge landed; but the behaviour never moved.
The authority to say “this no longer fits our strategy” is not granted by an organisation chart. It’s granted by a culture that has decided alignment matters, and by leaders at every level who visibly act on that decision every day.
Without those conditions, the CSO role becomes a kind of theatre: the appearance of strategic discipline without the capability that produces it. And I’ve written before about how expensive that particular performance turns out to be.
This is the half the 2007 article couldn’t see. It solved for the wrong scarcity. The scarce resource isn’t a person with the mandate to enforce strategy. It’s an organisational system in which strategy, leadership and culture are designed to work as one.
Strategy, leadership and culture need to eat breakfast together
For a generation, the culture debate has been anchored to the line widely attributed to Peter Drucker: “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It did useful work in its day, forcing culture onto executive agendas. But it framed culture and strategy as adversaries locked in a contest one of them must lose — and it gave executives permission to file culture under “important but unmanageable.”
My view, formed across years of advising leadership teams around the world, is that the metaphor needs retiring and replacing with something more relevant for the world we operate in today.
“Strategy, leadership and culture need to eat breakfast together”.
Not competing for primacy. Not sequenced with strategy first, culture eventually. One integrated system, at the same table, every single day.
The logic is simple, and each leg carries the other two. Strategy without cultural capability is fiction. It’s a document describing things your people cannot yet do. Culture without strategic direction is a warm feeling that generates no growth. And leadership is what binds them, because leaders get what they role-model, tolerate and reward.
Remove any one of the three from the table and the other two underperform. Align all three and something changes in kind, not just degree: execution stops being enforcement and becomes instinct. Nobody needs to walk into your office and challenge a misaligned decision, because the decision was never made.
That state of alignment is what I’ve long described as the equilibrium every innovation-led organisation ultimately has to reach, and reaching it is not an accident of chemistry. It is a combined, tactical, progressive and purposefully designed approach to reinventing the organisation for growth.
Designed, in the sense that the connections between strategic intent, leadership behaviour and cultural conditions are built deliberately rather than hoped for. Tactical, in the sense that it shows up in how real decisions get made this week, not in a values poster. Progressive, in the sense that it compounds, with each aligned decision making the next one easier.
Why this matters most for innovation-led growth
If your ambition is operational excellence, misalignment is expensive. But, if your ambition is innovation-led growth, it’s fatal.
Research I cite constantly because it refuses to close, shows that while approximately 84% of executives say innovation is critical to their growth strategy, only around 6% are satisfied with their innovation performance. Nearly two decades of strategy officers, transformation offices and execution frameworks, and the gap has barely moved.
That should tell us something. The gap is not a strategy gap, and it’s not an execution gap in the mechanical sense. It’s a capability gap, and capability lives in the space where strategy, leadership and culture either reinforce each other or quietly cancel each other out.
Innovation makes the point unavoidable, because innovation is not an activity an organisation performs. It’s an effect, a label your customers bestow when they experience something sufficiently valuable or transformative. No committee can declare it, and no chief officer can mandate it. The only thing leaders can actually manage are the conditions from which it emerges: the clarity of strategic intent, the behaviours leaders model under pressure, the safety people feel to challenge, test and fail intelligently. Conditions are a system property. They cannot be delegated to a role, however capable the person holding it.
So yes — by all means have a Chief Strategy Officer. The best ones I’ve worked with are exactly what the 2007 authors described: operators with the credibility to act, not theorise. But understand what the role can and cannot carry. A CSO can orchestrate the breakfast. They cannot be the meal.
Three questions for your top table
If the 2007 article’s resurfacing prompts anything, let it prompt these.
- First: do strategy, leadership and culture appear on your executive agenda as one conversation — or as three, owned by three different people, held on three different days?
- Second: if your strategy chief walked into any office tomorrow and challenged a misaligned decision, would the culture back them, or outlast them?
- And third: are you still asking whether you have the right strategy, when the harder question is whether you’ve built an organisation where strategy, leadership and culture are capable of delivering it together?
Nearly twenty years ago, HBR told us the strategist must be a doer. That was the right lesson for its time. The lesson for ours is bigger: in a world that refuses to hold still, growth doesn’t come from someone guarding the strategy. It comes from strategy, leadership and culture sitting at the same table every morning — eating breakfast together, and building the future between them.