We survey 262 chief executive officer (CEO) alumni of Harvard Business School and gather evidence on three aspects of each executive?s strategy practice: how formalized it is, how it is developed, and how it is implemented. We report three main results. First, firms with higher adoption of structured strategy practices outperform their peers; they grow faster and are more profitable, especially in industries with greater strategic complexity. Second, the appointment of CEOs with more structured styles appears to drive this outperformance, not firm-specific effects. This raises the question of how an executive comes to adopt more structured strategy practices. Our third finding provides a partial answer; business education can have a lasting impact on a CEO?s strategy practices as evidenced by a regression disconti-nuity analysis centered around a curriculum change at Harvard Business School.

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1 June 2026

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Management Science 72(6) , pp.4569 - 4596, 2026

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DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2023.03924

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2023.03924

This Journal article is published under the centre's Growth programme.

This publication comes under the following theme: Management practices and productivity