The CSO Role
The Chief Strategy Officer is the executive who takes the leading role in supporting organizations to create a vision, set goals, and make choices based on evidence and data.
Who is a
Chief Strategy Officer
The Chief Strategy Officer is the executive who takes the leading role in supporting organizations to create a vision, set goals, and make choices based on evidence and data. Effective CSOs help organizations connect dots between the dispersed signals, reach conclusions, and make decisions to align corporate and operational activities to achieve long-term strategic intentions.
Performing this role well requires continuously monitoring new events, market shifts, technology, and engaging decision-makers in discussions so the organization can realign or adjust paths. The role often includes aligning projects, budgets, business process technology, and investments.
The specific duties a Chief Strategy Officer may perform depends on the organization, industry, and reporting structure into which the CSO or strategy office fit. The Outthinker Strategy Network has found that strategy executives hold a variety of responsibilities that may include any combination of the following:
Strategy executives hold a variety of responsibilities that may include any combination of the following:
- Business development
- Board presentations
- Capital investments & divestments
- CEO support (Chief of Staff)
- Change Management
- Competitive and market intelligence
- Corporate Venture Capital
- Data Analytics
- Incubation
- Innovation
- Internal consulting
- Internal corporate communications
- Investor communications
- KPIs and performance management
- Marketing and branding
- M&A
- Partnerships and alliances
- Special projects
- Strategic planning
- Technology
- Operations strategy
- Organizational strategy
- Risk management
There are five key competencies associated with successful CSOs
Pattern recognition
Recognizing environment patterns, trends, new business models and relevant factors that can affect the business
Problem
framing
Framing contexts and facilitating meetings for productive discussion
Informal influence
Influencing decision making and strategy implementation at all levels
Strategic governance
Balancing strategic actions needs with operational and financial priorities
Aligning strategy to action
Translating vision and priorities into action through transformation projects, mergers and acquisitions, new product development, venture launches, etc.
The C-suite
Relative to other positions in the C-suite – Chief executive officer, Chief financial officer, Chief operations officer, Chief human resources officer, Chief marketing officer – there is a lack of understanding of what exactly a Chief Strategy Officer does in their role.
This lack of understanding coupled with the innate need for strategy executives to think differently (radically at times) about the future of the organization and where to place bets can make it feel like a lonely job. The Outthinker Strategy Network is a community of forward-looking strategy executives that are shaping the future and solving some of the world’s most complex problems.
