The CEO as Chief Storyteller

A strategy that cannot be communicated cannot be executed. The evidence suggests that how a CEO talks about strategy predicts competitive outcomes years in advance.

Ask ten employees at random to describe your firm’s strategy in their own words. If the answers are vague, inconsistent, or default to operational language like “we’re trying to be the best in our industry” or “we’re focused on cost leadership,” the strategy has not landed. It exists in a document somewhere. It may be rigorous and well-conceived. But it lives in the minds of the people who created it and nowhere else, which means the other 10,000 or 50,000 people in the organisation are making decisions without it.

This is the most common failure in strategic management, and it is almost always a communication failure. If the CEO cannot translate the strategy into a narrative that makes employees want to come to work, gives investors a reason to back you, and grows customers, the strategy remains trapped in PowerPoint and the organisation reverts to whatever it was doing before.

My research across 8,430 companies suggests this is more than an execution problem. It may be a leading indicator of competitive outcomes.

Language matters a lot

My content analysis of 120 annual reports across 20 years showed a consistent pattern: the language that CEOs used to describe their firms’ strategies predicted which firms would dominate their industries and which would not, years before the financial performance did.

In 2010, Steve Jobs told an audience at the D8 conference that “PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people.” That metaphor did strategic work that no slide deck could match. In a single image, it identified the external force Apple was organised around (the shift from desktop computing to mobile personal devices), told every engineer and designer what to build towards, and told them what to deprioritise, in language vivid enough to survive translation through every layer of the organisation. A product manager at Apple hearing that sentence could evaluate any proposal by asking whether it served the post-PC world or the old one. Three years earlier, when he introduced the iPhone at Macworld in 2007, Jobs had framed the product in the same outward-facing terms: “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” The sentence described a structural shift, not a phone, and it announced that Apple would build around it.

Gilead’s John Martin communicated with similar clarity but in entirely different language, which is what you would expect from a biotech CEO whose forces were different from those reshaping consumer technology. Asked what drove his strategy, Martin began with the world’s needs: “When you look for unmet medical needs to go after next, what’s at the top of the list? Hepatitis C virus infection.” He then spent $11 billion acquiring Pharmasset, a company with an unapproved hepatitis C treatment, telling investors the deal represented the chance to address 180 million patients worldwide. The market was sceptical and Gilead’s stock fell by roughly 10% on the announcement. The bet generated $58.5 billion in revenue over five years.

Jobs and Martin led firms in different industries with different forces, but their communication shared an orientation. They began with the external world and worked inward. They described forces in language specific enough that a listener could convert the statement into a decision.

What the opposite sounds like

Their competitors’ CEOs described different priorities. Amgen’s Kevin Sharer presented six strategic objectives to investors in 2011: manufacturing quality and lowest cost, cost structure management, capital allocation, balance sheet strength, shareholder returns, and bringing medicines to market. Five of the six concerned internal operations. The language was competent, professionally delivered, and gave investors no framework for understanding which external forces Amgen was building around or why.

HP’s successive CEOs, across 15 years, told variations of the same inward-facing story. Carly Fiorina framed the Compaq merger around cost synergies and competitive scale. Mark Hurd told analysts his focus was driving operational efficiency and cut 14,500 jobs in his first year. Meg Whitman announced a further restructuring that would eliminate 55,000 positions, describing her priority as restoring a balance of growth and efficiency. Across three CEO transitions and a decade and a half, none identified an external force that HP would organise around. Each described what the firm would do to itself, without addressing what was changing in the world that would determine whether any of it mattered.

Nokia’s Stephen Elop produced the most instructive failure of strategic communication in recent corporate history. His 2010 “burning platform” memo diagnosed the crisis in terms that pointed entirely inward: accountability failures, leadership gaps, poor collaboration. Every sentence described what Nokia was doing wrong internally. The memo was addressed to employees, but it gave them no framework for understanding the forces that were actually destroying Nokia’s position. It told them the building was on fire but not where the fire came from or where to run. The direction of attention in that memo, inward at failures rather than outward at forces, mirrored what the content analysis found across 20 years of Nokia’s annual reports. The language was the symptom; the orientation was what produced it.

Why narrative is a strategic function

The distinction between these CEOs had nothing to do with presentation skill. Jobs was magnetic and Sharer was polished, but the gap between them was functional: Jobs and Martin were using communication as a strategic instrument. Sharer and Elop were not.

When a CEO describes the firm’s strategy in terms of external forces, three things happen in the organisation. Employees gain a decision filter. If a product manager knows the firm is organised around the convergence of computing and consumer culture, she can evaluate a proposed feature by asking whether it serves that convergence. If it does, pursue it. If it does not, deprioritise it. She does not need to escalate the decision because the narrative has given her the criteria. I wrote about this concept in more detail in One Strategy, Five Stories: the same strategic logic needs different narrative frames for different audiences, but the underlying logic must be clear enough that people across the organisation can apply it independently.

The second effect is patience from investors. A CEO who can explain the logic connecting today’s investments to structural forces that will compound over a decade gives investors a framework for holding through quarters where the returns have not yet materialised. When Paul Polman arrived as Unilever’s CEO in 2009, one of his first acts was to abolish quarterly earnings guidance, telling investors that short-term targets encouraged decisions that harmed long-term performance. Unilever’s shares fell 8% on the announcement. He then launched the Sustainable Living Plan, making sustainability the organising logic of the entire company, and told Fortune magazine: “This is not a charity we’re talking about here, you know. We are running a business.” Polman’s story connected an external force (consumer and regulatory demand for sustainable products) to a business strategy, in language that forced investors to decide whether they believed the force was structural. Many did. Over Polman’s ten-year tenure, Unilever delivered nearly 300% shareholder return, outperforming its peers and the broader market.

For customers, the effect is confidence in the partnership. A firm whose CEO can articulate the structural forces the company is building around gives customers a reason to believe the partnership will be valuable as the market evolves. The customer is buying a position, not a product, and the CEO’s communication is what makes that position visible.

Each of these effects is operational. They change decisions, capital flows, and commercial relationships. This is why strategic communication has become a core leadership competency rather than a complementary skill. A CEO who can identify the right themes but cannot communicate them is doing half the job, and as my research shows, it is the half that matters less. A strategy that the leadership team understands but the organisation cannot act on produces precisely the outcome the content analysis documented at HP and Nokia: good execution of an increasingly irrelevant direction.

The discipline of repetition

Telling the story once is not telling it. A CEO who presents the strategy at an annual town hall and considers the communication job done will find that three months later the organisation has forgotten the specifics and reverted to operational defaults. Strategic narrative requires constant repetition, and the repetition needs to be connected to decisions rather than delivered as a standalone message.

When a firm makes an acquisition, the CEO should explain how it connects to the themes. When a business unit is restructured, the connection should be explicit. When quarterly results are reported, the narrative should frame them against the forces the firm is organised around, not just against last year’s numbers. Bob Iger did this at Disney across 15 years. Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Fox each looked like a standalone deal when announced. But Iger connected each one to the same story about digital distribution and the globalisation of consumer culture, giving employees a reason to believe the acquisitions were part of something larger. Investors gained a logic for supporting the capital commitment. Customers could see why the Disney brand was worth engaging with across platforms. Without that connecting story, each acquisition would have appeared disconnected and the internal resistance to each deal would have been greater.

The CEO who communicates well does not add communication to their leadership responsibilities. They integrate it into every interaction they already have: board meetings, investor calls, town halls, one-to-ones with direct reports, and the informal conversations that shape culture. The strategy should be audible in all of them, adapted to the audience but anchored to the same forces.

How to know whether it is working

Comprehension is the first test. Ask employees to describe the strategy. If they can, the narrative has landed. If they cannot, it has not, regardless of how many times it has been presented.

A harder test is whether stakeholder behaviour reflects the story. Are employees making decisions that serve the themes without being told to? Are investors holding through short-term underperformance because they understand the long-term logic? Are customers choosing the firm because of its positioning around forces that are reshaping their own markets?

The most demanding test is whether the narrative survives a crisis. When results disappoint, when a competitor makes a move, when the board asks difficult questions, does the CEO return to the forces and reaffirm the direction, or does the CEO pivot to operational language and abandon the thematic frame? The superfirms in my research maintained their thematic emphasis across 20 years that included the dot-com crash, the 2008 financial crisis, and periods of intense competitive pressure. The discipline of maintaining commitment through adversity is itself a form of communication: it tells the organisation that the themes are real, not decorative.

The question every CEO should ask is whether they could describe their firm’s strategy to a new employee in three minutes, in language specific enough that the employee could make a decision based on it by the end of the week. Jobs could, and so could Martin and Polman. The evidence suggests that this capability, far from being a soft skill, is one of the strongest predictors of whether a firm’s strategy will produce the outcomes it was designed for.