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ORGANISATIONAL NARRATOLOGY, PRACTICAL CRAFT | January 14, 2026 | 20 min read |
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Strategic Narrative for CEO-CFOs: The Hidden Logic of Strategy, Story, and Valuation

By Steve Seager, Principal

Strategic Narrative for CEO-CFOs: The Hidden Logic of Strategy, Story, and Valuation, digital graphic, Steve Seager, (2025)

Strategic Narrative for CEO-CFOs: The Hidden Logic of Strategy, Story, and Valuation, digital graphic, Steve Seager, (2025)

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In The Corporate Life Cycle: Business, Investment, and Management Implications, Aswath Damodaran shows that a CEO’s effectiveness can be read in how well they develop and maintain their company’s narrative as it moves through different growth stages — and that this narrative is central to how financial value is created.

What is a strategic narrative?

I’ve always identified more with investor relations, CFOs and CEOs than with branding, marketing or communications when it comes to strategic narrative. So I can’t believe it took me this long to discover Professor Aswath Damodaran’s work. (Click on writing → books in his website).

Damodaran is teacher of corporate finance and valuation at NYU’s Stern School of Business. Throughout his work, he demonstrates that a company’s narrative is key to investment success.

He argues that a company’s narrative, and its relation with numbers in later stages, drives how investors perceive and price its potential.

He also argues that a CEO’s effectiveness can be read in how well they develop and maintain that narrative in line with their stage of growth.

Now, most folk define strategic narrative as the “one big story” that tells the world who you are, where you came from, what you stand for, and your vision for the future. Used across sales, marketing, recruitment and so on, it’s a story intended to inspire and align.

Others — like Andy Raskin who works mainly with silicon valley tech companies — work with strategic narrative primarily as a “new game / old game” framing, complete with winners and losers and a movement to join. It’s sales-deck driven, bold, simplified, and provocative.

We have somewhat of a different take, more in line with Damodaran.

And it begins with a company’s strategy.

Strategy comes in all shapes and sizes

I recently wrote about strategy as a morphogenetic phenomenon — meaning there is no “one right way” to “make” or “do” strategy, or even a shared definition of what strategy is.* Instead, it evolves across companies and cultures in response to numerous factors.

That’s been my experience working with 100+ leaders over the decades, across different types of companies, across continents and contexts. I’ve encountered strategy in myriad forms. All of these are real-life examples:

  • A literal sketch on a literal napkin
  • A vision, a mission and a set of OKRs
  • A dogeared sales deck that carries a company all the way to unicorn status
  • A dozen dancing decks of various VRIOs, TAM/SAM/SOMs, and business model canvasses across an MNC
  • A patchwork of ill-fitting frameworks grabbed from the interwebs
  • Multiple disconnected Play to Win cascades
  • Intensely coordinated Balanced Scorecards / XPP
  • A Good to Great one-pager
  • Multi-annual strategic plans (MASPs) driven by spreadsheets
  • Nothing but insane optimism and a brilliant manifesto

I’ve seen companies succeed — and fail — with all of them.

And the CEOs I’ve worked with “do” strategy wildly differently, too.

Some CEOs rely almost entirely on instinct and pattern recognition, while others run tight, structured processes. (Yang, Christensen, Bloom, Sadun & Rivkin, 2020). Background and education make a significant difference to the forms strategy takes. But CEOs who bring even a bit more structure to their strategy process tend, on average, to run bigger and faster-growing firms (Yang, Christensen, Bloom, Sadun & Rivkin, 2020).

This supports my experience that the most successful (and healthful) organisations tend to share a few characteristics:

  • Where the CEO says they’re going, why, and how they’ll win, is clear and logical. There are no “plot holes” in their strategy, so to speak.
  • Senior leadership can articulate that strategy clearly and consistently.
  • The internal organisation understands how they can contribute to strategy and their internal storytelling reflects it.
  • External communications clearly reflect and exemplify their strategy.

We call this “narrative integrity” — where the connective logic of a strategy is clear, and storytelling flows naturally, inside and out, as a consequence.

In line with Damodaran’s take on how company’s are valuated, the degree to which an organisation has this narrative integrity is, in my experience, a very good indicator of the state of the company itself.

The coherence illusion and a curse

Research consistently shows that the absence of narrative integrity is widespread — including at the very top of organisations.

No One Knows Your Strategy — Not Even Your Top Leaders, a widely cited MIT Sloan Management Review study, found that fewer than one in three senior leaders could accurately articulate their company’s strategic priorities. And most leaders believed their organisations were aligned, even when they were not. Secondary analyses of the research show that while over 90% of senior leaders report that they understand their company’s strategy, only 28% can accurately articulate key strategic priorities.

More recent research continues to surface the same pattern closer to home.

A 2025 survey of Dutch directors and senior managers found that over 40% of senior managers considered their own corporate strategies insufficiently clear, insufficiently concrete, or insufficiently translated into day-to-day decision-making with strategic priorities not well understood across the organisation — despite the presence of formal strategy documents, decks, and communication efforts.

This aligns with findings from a 2023 open-access MDPI study that shows that strategic intent systematically fragments as it moves across organisational tiers, with different levels often holding incompatible interpretations of the same strategy. A 2025 systematic literature review on strategic alignment further reinforces this, concluding that alignment failures are structural rather than motivational.

In fact, decades of research on coordination and shared mental models show that alignment depends less on the volume of communication than on whether people share a coherent understanding of how goals, roles, and decisions connect (Okhuysen & Bechky, 2009; DeChurch & Mesmer-Magnus, 2007; Mathieu et al., 2000).

So the problem is not communication problem in the typical sense.

It is a breakdown in strategy’s connective logic.

In practice, strategy elements end up being developed and discussed as components rather than as a system: market choices here, product decisions there, operating models and financial assumptions somewhere else. The pieces all exist, but the relationships between them remain implicit or fragmented.

Leaders may understand their own domain deeply, but no one is holding the full chain of reasoning end-to-end.

In my experience, “all” of strategy is most often present somewhere, somehow — but it is simply not coherent as a whole. It exists on multiple levels of abstraction, across initiatives, and remains implicit.

And the cognitive bias that is the curse of knowledge compounds this coherence problem.

Once leaders have lived with a strategy for an extended period — building it, debating it, refining it — it becomes extremely difficult to judge what it will take for others to truly understand it.

People who know something consistently overestimate how obvious it will be to those who don’t. As a result, critical steps in the underlying logic of the strategy are left implicit. Assumptions go unstated, shorthand creeps in, and explanations jump ahead of the reasoning others need to be able to follow it.

In combination with fragmented connective logic, this creates a powerful failure mode: leaders believe they have been clear, while the organisation lacks a shared basis for interpretation and action. Strategy appears aligned on the surface, but does not travel intact. Meaning diverges as it moves, and coherence erodes long before execution visibly breaks down.

As a result, alignment becomes assumed rather than structural. Execution inevitably drifts. Storytelling and strategic communication turns into explanation after the fact.

This is failure mode that narrative integrity addresses: not by improving communication about strategy, but by clarifying the internal logic that allows a strategy to be genuinely understood, shared, and executed.

Think of it this way:

Your story is your strategy

“The mistake people make is thinking that this is just about marketing. No, the company’s story is the strategy!”

— Ben Horowitz, Andreessen-Horowitz

For Damodaran, Horowitz, and for us, the backbone of your strategic narrative is your strategy itself.

This is the story as told in the deck the CEO owns: the one used in fundraising, partner meetings, strategy discussions, analyst lunches, and internal alignment. It is the deck that enables your leadership team to understand and execute strategy.

It is the company gospel — the source from which every other deck and piece of collateral should draw.

This detail is critical: your strategic narrative is a synthesis, not a summary, of your strategy.

Do not simplify strategy. Synthesise it.

You’ll often hear people say that a strategic narrative should be an overview — a summary of your strategy.

This is not a good idea.

  • Simplifying reduces complexity. It pares things down at the cost of nuance — like deleting tabs in a financial model until only a few numbers remain. Clearer, yes — but you’ve lost the underlying logic.

  • Synthesising adds value. It integrates the key connecting elements of your strategy into a coherent whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

This matters because strategy lives or dies on your critical business path.

Your market choices, product and service choices, operating model, people model, and financial logic do not sit independently. Together, they form a chain of interdependent decisions.

How well these elements connect is the single most important factor in strategy success — far more important than which strategy model or framework you use, or how strong any one individual component of your strategy is.

They have to work together: All the elements of strategy, together, hand in hand with execution.

This is exactly where our work focuses.

We surface the connective logic across all the elements of your strategy and thread them into one cohesive line of argumentation — a narrative that explains how and why your strategy hangs together and how it can actually be executed.

This synthesising does not remove information; it reorganises it.
This synthesising does not compress meaning; it elevates it.

Surfacing this red thread is the starting point for crafting your strategic narrative.

We get there through storylining — a discipline shared by both management consulting and film and television production.

Storylining before storytelling

“The structure … and arcs of each episode are drawn out, discussed, ripped down and rewritten, before a single line of dialogue is written.”

— Breaking Bad storyliner, Adam Westbrook

Between them, the CEO-CFO partnership tends to embody the two core capabilities required to develop a strategic narrative: the detailed analytical logic of the CFO, and the vision, drive and decision-making of the CEO.

Mirroring that partnership, we use two narratological disciplines in crafting strategic narrative: storylining and storytelling.

Storylining comes first.

Think of your favourite film or TV series!

Long before anyone writes a line of dialogue, someone called a storyliner will sit down to craft the internal logic that will drive the plot forwards. Only once that storyline is strong, will they look for the right writers and creatives to bring that storyline alive.

In business terms, storylining involves identifying the central business logic of a company. And CFOs excel at it (no pun intended).

The skills it involves are far closer to strategy formulation than people realise:

  • Scanning and sense-making (Mintzberg, 1994; Weick, 1995)

  • Diagnosing bottlenecks/the crux of business challenges (Rumelt, 2011)

  • Analytical and abductive reasoning (Porter, 1996; Martin, 2009)

  • Synthesising insights into coherent logic (Andrews, 1987; Prahalad & Hamel, 1990)

  • Recognising business patterns and rhythms (Weick, 1995; Juarrero, 1999)

I have worked in storylining in TV and film, and in management consulting, and have refined my approach over decades.

The storylining approach is strategy-model-agnostic because, as a discipline, it strongly focuses on the connective logic of what you are saying.

To clarify: This is not about brainstorming. Nor is it a “creative” process in the typical sense. You don’t need to add anything, or take anything away, from your strategy.

Instead, you need to surface and strengthen its causal logic — the disciplined reasoning —  of your strategy.

Once clear, this storyline becomes the backbone of your strategic narrative.

Everything else should flow from there: Your key messaging, your story systems (technologies, market forces, customers, for example), your positioning, propositions and more.

With good engagement, a few workshops, and a firm scout mindset for the management team, storylining work is energising — challenging, fast, sharp, and fun.

As I say often, a management team that can storyline well, can think well.

Stronger story, stronger strategy

“If you make your story better, you make the strategy better.”

— Ben Horowitz, Andreessen-Horowitz

Working on your story strengthens your strategy. It sharpens understanding, exposes weak logic, and clarifies the what, how and why.

It aligns leaders, teams, decks and decisions around one coherent strategic logic.

This brings many benefits:

  • It gives you a shared language and grammar for sense-making and decision-making across the organisation — from field to office, across functions and disciplines.
  • It creates alignment as you grow and scale. Whatever strategy model you use, keeping a central strategic narrative alive keeps all other decks, collateral — and hearts and minds — aligned and moving in the right direction.
  • It makes strategy tangible. People understand the where, why, what and how: where you will play, how you will win, and what your endgame is.
  • It invites broader contribution. Articulating strategy in narrative form (rather than “communicating about” it) helps people see better how they can meaningfully contribute.
  • It provides an organisational “master text”. It becomes the reference point for messaging across functions — web content, boilerplates, one-pagers, position papers, annual reports, sales decks, marketing collateral, and more.
  • It sharpens your market position. To paraphrase David Brier: if you don’t give the market the narrative to talk about, they’ll define it for you. A strategic narrative lets you take the game to the market.

Ultimately, it makes your strategy coherent, narratable and portable.

It ensures that the right story travels behind the scenes — in the rooms where it matters most.

It genuinely doesn’t matter which strategy model you use, what shape it’s in, or how you “do” strategy as a CEO or founder.

We’ve seen a fair bit over the years, in all its glory and its gory.

And there’s always a storyline to be had.

Back to where we started

Source: The Corporate Life Cycle: Business, Investment, and Management Implications (2024)

Damodaran’s work shows that a company’s narrative is key to current and future investment success — part of the hidden connective tissue of corporate value.

He argues that a company’s narrative shapes how investors perceive and price its potential, and that a CEO’s effectiveness can often be read in how well they develop and maintain that narrative in line with the company’s stage of growth.

Seen in light of what we’ve explored, this should now be clear.

When a leadership team lacks a shared, coherent strategic logic, it doesn’t remain an internal issue for long. The illusion of coherence — strategies that look aligned on paper but are not bound together in practice — will surface externally as inconsistency, drift, and brittle execution.

Narrative integrity, then, is not about polish or persuasion. It is one of the ways that strategy’s coherence — or the lack of it — gets priced in.

As Damodaran positions it, your strategic narrative is the hidden connective tissue of valuation.

Soon, we’ll take a closer look at how strategic narrative should evolve across the various growth stages of a company — and how it synchronises strategy and story over time.

If you’re a CEO, CFO or management team wanting to move their strategy communication to the next level, feel free to mail me.

Until then…

Be splendid.

— Steve

* Although there is no one commonly agreed definition of what strategy is, Professor Clayton Williams might be on the path to changing that with his book “What Strategy is”. Highly recommended for strategy nerds.

References

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