The discipline of strategy, owned by the board.
In twenty years of working with boards and executive teams, I have watched strategy migrate out of the boardroom. It now arrives once a year as a polished deck: pre-agreed by the executive, often shaped by advisers, and presented for approval rather than for challenge. Somewhere along the way, the board’s role in strategy shrank to a signature. The cost is not abstract. It shows up as capital committed to a business model past its peak, as competitive positions that erode for years before the numbers admit it, and as directors held accountable for choices they never truly made. Strategy in the Boardroom argues the opposite case: that strategy is a discipline and that the board must own it.
Owning strategy does not mean writing it. Executives propose; that is their job. But a board that only approves has abdicated the part of the work that belongs to it: testing whether the plan rests on a genuine source of advantage, whether the capital allocation matches the stated ambition, whether the risks taken are the ones the board intended to take, and whether last year’s strategy still deserves this year’s money. That work does not fit into a single away day. It is a discipline, practised across the year, with its own tools, standards, and habits — and it is learnable.
What this publication delivers
Each edition takes one question a board should be asking about strategy and works it through to a practical conclusion: what to probe, what evidence to demand, and what decision should follow. Expect writing on how competitive advantage is created and defended, how capital allocation reveals a company's actual strategy, how to challenge an executive’s plan without undermining the executive, and what strategic oversight looks like in the 11 months between planning cycles. The register is a board paper or an FT comment piece, not a management textbook: no frameworks for their own sake, no motivational language, and no advice that dissolves on contact with a real agenda.
This is the sister publication to AI in the Boardroom. The boundary between them is deliberate: where AI is the subject, it lives there; here, AI is one competitive force among many — alongside capital, regulation, geography, and the ordinary difficulty of choosing what not to do.
Who it is for
I write for the people who carry accountability for strategy at the top of organisations: chairs, non-executive directors, senior independent directors, and committee members, together with the chief executives and C-suite leaders who bring strategy to the board, and the investors and advisers who sit around them. If your name is on the decision, this is written for you.
Who I am
I am Karim Harbott, a Chartered Director, board-level strategist, and executive educator. I serve as a Senior Independent and Non-Executive Director, lead Strategy for Directors at the Institute of Directors, and deliver board development to Public Investment Fund companies in Saudi Arabia through the Centre for Governance. Before moving to board work, I spent two decades leading enterprise transformation — at McKinsey, at Barclays, and at the consultancy I co-founded and grew to multi-million-pound revenues. I am the author of The 6 Enablers of Business Agility. I have sat on both sides of the boardroom table: as the executive defending a strategy under challenge, and as the director whose job is to challenge it. This publication draws on both.
If that is the work you do, subscribe — and if you know a fellow director wrestling with a strategy that arrives as a fait accompli, send this to them.
