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As a professor of strategic management and as a consultant to organizations on strategy and change, the author focused on the activities that are necessary for leaders to create effective strategy and to execute successfully. The author has also been responsible for equipping the larger teams of strategy professionals (and future strategy professionals) who support these leaders with the approaches, the methods, and the tools necessary to plan effectively, to assess effectiveness, and to correct problems in strategy and execution. Whether long-term company leaders, entrepreneurs, or turnaround companies, chief executive officers (CEOs) understand that strategy and execution are requirements for growth and, ultimately, their unique responsibility. The paper aims to offer a view of strategy and execution from women CEOs of top companies, including those who weathered the financial crisis and others changing their business model as the climate changes. The paper offers a set of questions to help company leadership execute their strategy.

The paper represents a viewpoint supported by secondary sources and financial data.

CEOs whose companies have prospered during the Great Recession and beyond have a lot to teach us about strategic execution in an uncertain world. There is always a crisis or a change in industry structure that threatens strategic execution. This paper focuses on women and how they face this challenge as CEOs of top companies.

Strategic execution must align with strategy or growth will not happen as planned.

There are things CEOs and general managers can do to ensure their strategic execution leads to the results they plan. Those things have been identified in this paper.

The most powerful asset companies have is their talent base, their employees.

The corporate examples, the understanding of industry structure change, and the importance of talent and risk are seen through the lens of women CEOs.

Whether they support long-term growth companies, entrepreneurial firms or turnarounds, top teams need to make bold strategic investment choices in times of boom, bust or pandemic. This paper aims to discuss firm strategies, as evidenced by their investment choices, over a 21-year period during which they led firms committed to growth through times of crisis and disruption.

The starting point for this research is Fortune magazine’s 100 Fastest Growing Companies, published in 2018 and updated in 2019. The list is based on the magazine’s ranking of the world’s top three-year performers in revenues, profits and stock returns for the four quarters preceding publication. Inclusion on the list is all about growth, not starting size (the smallest and not renown). The classification of firms by industry sector follows Fortune’s nomenclature. Comparing these firms with industry peers in the same period, the authors look at Fortune’s 100 Fastest-Growing Companies of 2018 from the vantage point of their financials from 1999 to 2017, years that included the tech boom and bust, the mortgage meltdown and the Great Recession. This period also saw a relatively long expansion which was, paradoxically, punctuated by a trade war with China and recession fears that have impacted spending for growth. Only 32 of Fortune’s 2018 list made it to Fortune’s 100 Fastest Growing Companies of 2019. The authors call them the Persistent 32 and examine their investment and performance metrics from 2018 through 2020.

The Persistent 32 – companies that have survived multiple recessions, including the COVID-19 recession, and continue to grow – have lessons to teach, although there is no silver bullet or secret formula, even within the same industry. It was found that in the group of 32, the average company lifespan is 28.75 years and astute, decisive leadership matters. Companies that persist make unique, strategic resource choices. They postpone expenditures on marketing and sales, fixed assets or R&D or all three depending on their needs, rather than fit with industry. They continue to invest in future growth. Their people are not expendable: employee retention during a recession has been a familiar strategy for the top growers covered in this investigation throughout the period (1999–2020). They cut cost of goods and services produced (COGS). The Persistent 32, loathing the idea of cutting COGS in the face of earlier recessions or recessionary threats, are cutting expenses other than personnel expenditures now. Amazon, Nvidia, Stamps.com, Lam Research, Supernus Pharmaceuticals all continue to rein in costs while simultaneously reinvesting in growth. They communicate their concerns and plans to their constituents. These companies retained and grew headcount while communicating their safety program as well as work-from-home and social-distancing strategies to employees, customers, shareholders and elected officials during the COVID-19 recession of 2020. They plan for supply disruptions. All have already articulated their plans for supply disruptions or alternative sources. Both the Federal Government and semiconductor companies are looking to jump-start the development of new chip factories in the USA as concern grows about reliance on Asia as a source of critical technology. They sense, seize, transform. David Teece’s dynamic capabilities framework is still the best way to turn every black swan event into an opportunity for business based on newly immediate needs. They work remotely. Businesses that are growing despite the recession are already committed to remote work. Join them and take the high anxiety out of work for both employees and customers.

The starting point for our research was Fortune magazine’s 100 Fastest Growing Companies, published in 2018 and updated in 2019. The list is based on the magazine’s ranking of the world’s top three-year performers in revenues, profits and stock returns for the four quarters preceding publication. Only 32 of Fortune’s 2018 list made it to Fortune’s 100 Fastest Growing Companies of 2019. The authors call them the Persistent 32 and examine their investment and performance metrics from 2018 through 2020. They sought answers to three questions: First, do the fastest growing firms invest heavily in their businesses during recessions? The authors looked at the 100 fastest growing companies from 1999 to 2017 and then the Persistent 32 from 2018 to 2020. Second, what happened to the investments and performance of the Persistent 32 during the pandemic and recession that began in the first quarter of 2020? Where did they invest or curtail investment, what plans did they make around COVID-19 and what headcount decisions did they make? Third, do growth-committed firms follow different investment strategies that can be categorized based on spending patterns?

Companies that can survive and grow through the hardest of times have lessons to teach, although there is no silver bullet or secret formula, even within the same industry.

Employee retention during a recession has been a familiar strategy for the top growers covered in this investigation throughout the period (1999–2020). This strategy is not generally common among US firms. Indeed, it says something about the growth prospects of these firms and their dependence on talent and need to leverage their prior investment in recruiting and training employees.

What is important about this topic? Whatever the industry, trying times call for top teams to try harder, identify priorities, spend to achieve them, manage stakeholder expectations and protect and build their access to top talent. The authors can help with the last four: they set up a structure for analyzing firm spending and performance metrics, based on Gulati and others writing for business practitioners; they comb the evidence for spending and performance shifts in good times and bad from 1999 to 2020; they categorize firm strategies by spending patterns versus industry; they examine the findings for insights; and finally, the authors identify key actions that set still growing firms apart.

The purpose of this paper is to present a viewpoint on aligning strategy and execution to produce superior business results.

The paper examines the long-term financials of the top ten growers to reveal companies that have continued to grow in good economic times and bad, including the Great Recession. While some companies dug deeper into their core businesses during the financial crisis, others continued to innovate.

Where companies continued to focus on strategy execution, they were rewarded, for example, Amazon’s compound annual growth rate for the ten-year period that included the financial crisis was 36.45 per cent; in the past three years, Amazon’s compound annual growth rate (CAGR) has been 56.76 per cent. Most of the top ten long-term growers are headed by the same founder/entrepreneur.

Look beyond the past three years for models of successful strategy execution.

For long-term company leaders, entrepreneurs, or turnaround experts, strategic execution is no oxymoron, but a requirement for growth and, ultimately, their unique responsibility.

The paper identifies three major focus areas for strategy teams and company leadership: 1. customer centricity and strategy execution; 2. learning from survivors; and 3. rethinking capabilities and talent.

As a professor of strategic management and as a consultant to organizations on strategy and marketing transformation, we have focused on the activities that are necessary for leaders to create effective strategy and to execute successfully. We have also been responsible for equipping the larger teams of strategy professionals (and future strategy professionals) who support these leaders with the approaches, the methods, and the tools necessary to plan effectively, to assess effectiveness, and to correct problems in strategy and execution. We bring that perspective to this viewpoint paper.

Jardine Matheson & Company is a Hong Kong multi‐industry conglomerate that has gone through political upheaval, global and regional economic crises, and has survived and transformed itself several times in the process, using unique governance schemes and financial performance measures to manage risk and volatility.

This research paper answers the following question: how do firms manage risk? Can firms effectively use governance and financial measurements to manage risk? Is this a distinctive capability that contributes to competitive advantage and sustainability?

The analysis reveals the extent to which Jardine Matheson adapted to changes in the environment and learned from failure to manage risk.

The research is analytical, observational and interpretive. The analytic approach is generalizable and provides insight useful to scholars and practitioners.

Firms seeking to reduce the volatility in their businesses (or in their stratregic business units) might restructure to allow low beta businesses to manage higher beta businesses, as in the case of Jardine Matheson & Company.

The research findings communicated here present a picture of Jardine Matheson’s ability to acquire, integrate and apply knowledge to manage risk and volatility of high beta businesses.

The central focus of this paper is the mentorship relationship of economist Fritz Machlup and his graduate student Edith Penrose, and specifically how that relationship contributed both to her development as a scholar and to her seminal work, The Theory of the Growth of the Firm.

The qualitative research on which this paper is based is the sociohistorical biographical approach, based on a close examination of published works and archival materials. Content analysis is used to draw inferences about Fritz Machlup's mentoring content, style, and impact on Penrose's methodology and argumentation as reflected in The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, and the correspondence exchanged while Penrose was writing The Theory of the Growth of the Firm.

The Theory of the Growth of the Firm mirrors Machlup's methodology and methodological framework. The arguments supporting Penrose's theoretic model of the growth of firms were discussed, debated and shaped by the exchange of ideas in the Penrose/Machlup correspondence.

While Penrose's work has been acknowledged as “breakthrough” in the areas of entrepreneurship and firm growth, there has been little recognition of the role of her mentor in its creation. This study sets out to correct what would appear to be an historical oversight as well as to understand how Machlup practiced mentorship; how he perceived the roles of mentor and mentee; Machlup's contribution to his graduate students, and the extent to which his students incorporated the learning into their own work.

The article looks at how companies pursuing a three‐horizon growth strategy weathered the last economic downturn and what became of their growth initiatives.

The paper examines the financial performance and continued investment of three growing companies from 1996‐2004: Bombardier (Canada), Hutchison Whampoa (Hong Kong/China) and Disney (US).

The Bombardier, Disney and Hutchison Whampoa cases teach a powerful lesson about the importance of using investment in growth to manage uncertainty and limit downside risk.

While the focus of this article is on three companies only, the financial performances of a dozen other growing firms are examined over the same period for purposes of comparison.

Following the last downturn, companies sought to preserve the core and outsource non‐critical functions to reduce the cost of business. Some chose to sideline growth initiatives during this period. This article analyzes the outcomes for three companies that continued to invest in growth during and after this period.

This article addresses a series of questions. Is a three‐horizon growth strategy sustainable in a downturn? Have companies that pursued a three‐horizon strategy actually grown? Do they continue to finance the growth of horizon two and horizon three businesses? Have any viable options matured?

Jardine Matheson & Company is a Hong Kong multi‐industry conglomerate that has gone through political upheaval, global and regional economic crises, and has survived and transformed itself several times in the process. Firm learning and adaptability are audited across five breakpoints (1832, 1885, 1977, 1996, 2004), thereby contributing information about changes in the long‐term, large‐scale behavior of Jardine Matheson & Company. The paper takes a historical transformation approach to learning and knowledge in Jardine Matheson, largely inspired by Edith Penrose and The Theory of the Growth of the Firm and the recent work of William Lazonick to describe a theory of innovative enterprise. The paper also draws on contemporary resource‐based and knowledge‐learning literature. The paper addresses the question of whether firms can learn from change and apply new knowledge for continuous reinvention. The analysis reveals the extent to which Jardine Matheson stimulated or adapted to changes in the environment and saw new opportunities for value capture that demanded the development or reuse of capabilities and the reconfiguration of relationships necessary for survival, transformation and advantage in Hong Kong and the ASEAN. The research is analytical, observational and interpretive. The analytic approach is generalizable and provides insight useful to scholars and practitioners. The research itself is neither predictive nor prescriptive. The research findings communicated here present a picture of Jardine Matheson's ability to acquire, integrate and apply knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Fritz Machlup's method and use of scenario analysis in the policy discussions around exchange rate solutions to balance of payments problems.

The qualitative research on which this paper is based is the sociohistorical biographical approach, based on a close examination of published works and archival materials.

What makes Machlup unique is his focus on the impact to an economic system of discrete human actions, each set of actions associated with a change in exchange rate policy and the operations and institutions necessary to implement it. Impact on the system was evaluated in terms of three values – balance of payments adjustment, liquidity and confidence. In his use of a system's approach, his focus on change and adjustment to change, and most particularly his focus on human action, Machlup is also distinctively Austrian.

This is the first paper generated from the author's far larger planned study of Fritz Machlup and the Bellagio Group.

The collaborative exploration of alternative futures by senior teams has become increasingly important to strategic planning by governments and corporations.

The story of the Fritz Machlup's contribution to exchange rate regimes, international trade and the balance of payments has remained largely untold.

Reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the article in context.

In any meeting with a personal finance consultant or pensions advisor, inevitably the path they encourage individuals to follow involves diversification to spread the risk around. This is seen as a given: sound financial advice that would spell disaster if ignored. However this advice is often either ignored or deemed inappropriate for firms as a whole who follow one or two markets religiously, and if they do diversify they quickly hear the sages of the financial markets questioning their strategy. But should not firms take a leaf out of personal finance and spread their risk around?

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to‐digest format.