Innov8rs Learning Lab on Strategy, Leadership, Governance & Portfolio Management, 11-13 October 2022

Making strategy behind closed doors is a prescription for failure when disruptions are coming from all directions.

Formulating and executing sound organizational strategy is difficult work. Strategy is often made by elite teams and thus can be limited by their biases about competitors, customer needs, and market forces. And it can be an uphill battle convincing stakeholders across the company to channel money, time, and energy in a new and unproven direction.

The solution to both the strategy formulation and execution challenges is radical: Open up your strategy process. Open strategy offers leadership teams access to diverse sources of external knowledge they wouldn’t otherwise have, while also making individual leaders aware of their biases and helping them build the buy-in needed to speed up execution.

This approach is particularly valuable when companies face disruptive threats and contemplate transformational change. It’s much easier to master disruptions when you’re forging strategy in concert with others who view the world through a different lens than you do. Involving people from outside the C-suite — and outside your company — in strategy-making not only provides a wellspring of fresh ideas but also mobilizes and galvanizes everyone involved. Thus, execution becomes an integral part of strategy. The best part: All this can happen without a loss of control over the strategy-making process.

In this talk Christian Stadler presents a new philosophy, key tools, step-by-step advice, and fascinating case studies—from companies that range from Barclays to Adidas—to guide business leaders in a ground-breaking new approach to strategy.

In case you are wondering whether it works: a survey of 200 business leaders shows that although open-strategy techniques were deployed for only 30 percent of their initiatives, those same initiatives generated 50 percent of their revenues and profits. Join this session to learn the ins and outs of this novel approach.

Christian Stadler is a professor of strategic management at Warwick Business School and Forbes Contributor. He has been listed by Thinkers50 as a future thinker in 2013 and has been quoted in over 7,000 media outlets including Al Jazeera, CNN, BBC, New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. His new book Open Strategy. Mastering Disruption from Outside the C-Suite” helps companies to craft strategy in a new unconventional way, one tailor-made for today’s faster, more volatile business environment. Christian’s previous book Enduring Success: What We Can Learn from the History of Outstanding Corporations was the first one with a non-U.S. perspective on long-range success.