Recently attended Chief Strategy Officers forum and was struck by how different the role of strategy is in each organisation and how differently strategy activities are distributed at different levels (e.g. a group function or BU or front line team). As it goes to the heart of practicing strategy, I wondered if there is any research out their that looks at the range of designs and pros/cons of each? Or if there are even thoughts on this subject? 

Dear David

Referrng to the study there is nothing that goes deeper. However, at the moment we are working on topics concerning the corporate strategy function.

Best regards,

Thomas

Interesting study - is there more material published/available that goes deeper?

Dear David and other readers

Referring to the discussion on the corporate strategy department design you will attached find our study on CSOs.
Best regards,
Thomas

In one way, I do assume, Strategy Practice (SP) = Bringing Change (BC) + Sustaining Change (SC) + Preventing Change (PC). Stragety is an effort of 'planned change' that an organization keep practicing, but the 'real change' tis beyond the control of an organization's strategy practices. There are evidences that promising companies have been failed and very very small iniatives have been emerged as global giants. My understanding about it is that the real change has its own way of happening, and strategy practice is to some extent a guess work. In fact the real change is a big force for a company to its success or unsuccess.

Organizations are interacting units with such big forces, and considered as organisms, and do have immune response as of human. They do not want to permit unwanted elements into their organizations. We know, change is 'different' than usual. Now the 'difference' need not necessarily be accepted by all the stakeholders i.e.  some are facilitating and some are blocking the change initiatives. Now, the interesting thing is how the organization is immuned to the forces that are blocking the change initiatives. The strategy practice is mostly the 'fighting' with the change blockers, and the fighting modalities varies from organizations to organizations.

The change seekers (may) win the battle, this does not mean that they are free from the enemies, than again, it has to fight for sustaining the change initiatives. In due course of time, again the real change forces are appealing/compelling for another change, and if the organization does not want to bring the change now, it has to fight in order to prevent by practicing the strategy ..............

Thank you for commenting. Can you expand on what you mean by building immunity

Thank you

It is quite a fundemental question in the practice of strategy that I am surprised there is not more work in this area. Contacts in the main strategy consultancies also admit that while they have perspectives on effective design of other functional areas (HR, finance etc) similar views are not available on Strategy

I doubt that strategy is much more than  fighting/building 'immunity'. My experience and paid research suggest- strategy practitioners are spending much more time, energy, and resources in fighting or building the 'immunity'. Unfortunately, research on corporate strategy could not focus on corporate immune system, and lacking a derrived definition of it yet. I guess, you are also thinking around the 'immunity' because each organization/organism has its own immune systems.

Hello David,

I also attended the CSO summit last week in London. You might be interested in the paper by Angwin, Paroutis, and Mitson (2009) published by the California Management Review.

This is certainly an interesting area for research.