MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Why Good Arguments Make Better Strategy

Strategy is hard — really hard — to do well. Many leaders will admit this privately: In an anonymous 2019 survey conducted by Strategy&, 37% of 6,000 executive respondents said that their company had a well-defined strategy, and 35% believed that their company’s strategy would lead to success.

Great leaders create ways of engaging their teams that can cut through this strategic fog. They may adopt frameworks to guide their analysis, but they expect participants in strategy discussions to contribute coherent reasoning and defensible ideas. Amazon is well known for its requirement that major initiatives be proposed in the form of a six-page memo. The virtue of the memo — versus a slide deck — is that writing in full sentences and paragraphs forces leaders to clarify how their ideas connect to each other. Similarly, Netflix has driven stunning transformations in the media landscape in part through its success at encouraging its leaders to debate ideas frankly and its willingness to empower them to take risks without waiting for an annual strategy planning process. It is no surprise that CEO Reed Hastings views working from home as “a pure negative” for the company, in part because “debating ideas is harder now.”

About the Author

Jesper B. Sørensen (@sorensenjesperb) is the Robert A. and Elizabeth R. Jeffe Professor of Organizational Behavior, and Glenn R. Carroll (@guidedlantern) is the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business. They are coauthors of Making Great Strategy: Arguing for Organizational Advantage (Columbia University Press, 2021), from which this article is adapted.

Learn more about MIT SMR.