What is a “Chief Strategy Officer” and what do they do, like, all day?
Here’s something I’ve absolutely never understood: the Chief Strategy Officer.
Let’s run through this pretty quickly. First, you need to understand the numbers here. From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, the average size of the executive team — i.e. the C-Suite — doubled, from 5 to 10. So in the mid-1980s, it was probably:
- CEO
- CFO
- COO
- CMO
- Maybe one more
Now there’s five new roles, and I guarantee you one of them is Chief Strategy Officer at a lot of places.
At the same time, we do a ton of chest-thumping about entrepreneurship and innovation, right? But U.S. companies are actually becoming more bureaucratic, and majorly so.
My man Peter Drucker wrote in Harvard Business Review back in 1988 that companies would start to get lean, hack middle managers, and the like. In the last 30 years, we’ve actually moved in the opposite direction. Middle management should be dying, but it’s thriving.
And now we get to the Chief Strategy Officer. Well, we will in a second.
