Wharton@Work

February 2025 | 

The Strategy Architect: Nicolaj Siggelkow

The Strategy Architect: Nicolaj Siggelkow

In our fourth installment of our Wharton Spotlight Series, we spoke with professor Nicolaj Siggelkow, Wharton’s go-to strategy expert, co-director of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management, and vice dean of the MBA program. He is also co-author of Connected Strategy, which explores how companies can create continuous, customized customer relationships to drive competitive advantage. Whether he’s teaching, researching, or consulting, Siggelkow brings energy, clarity, and fresh perspectives to the art of building and executing strategies that actually work.

Wharton@Work: You’ve been studying, researching, and teaching about strategy for your entire career. Where and when did your interest begin?

Nicolaj Siggelkow: It started when I was an undergrad and had the great opportunity to work with Paul Milgrom and John Roberts on their textbook Economics, Organization and Management. That got me intrigued about strategy, and I decided on an academic career in it. I went to Harvard, where I was fortunate to work with Mike Porter, and that solidified my interest. Milgrom, Roberts, and Porter were all thinking about the notion of interdependencies among strategic choices, which I pursued later as my PhD thesis. I’ve been working on it ever since, thinking about firms as systems of interdependent strategic choices.

W@W: Strategy and Management for Competitive Advantage is the longest-running program at Wharton Executive Education. To what do you attribute the success and the longevity of the program?

NS: On the one hand, it remains popular because strategy is not a fad. Every company needs to think about how to differentiate and position itself, and how to think about competition. But the ways to do those things, the tools you can use, are changing all the time. Connected Strategy, issues around strategy and environmental impact, different modalities of joint ventures and alliances, and now AI — these methods and ideas are evolving.

W@W: Why do so many firms continue to struggle when it comes to strategy?

NS: There's always a tension between the short run and the long run. When a firm creates a five-year plan, the environment will probably change so much during that time that much of the plan might not be relevant in five years. So, the conclusion that some draw is to stop making plans, instead of making a plan that can be adapted as circumstances change. Ultimately, it’s about aligning an entire organization and making resource-allocation decisions in a consistent way. Flying by the seat of your pants, without a strategy, is probably not going to work for the long term.

Doing business without a strategy can work when you're a small startup and everyone knows what they're doing, but when you grow, you need a strategy. We’ve had a lot of participants who come to the program for that reason — the firm has become large enough that they need a game plan for how they will achieve their goals and gain a competitive advantage.

Another issue is that everyone loves the adjective “strategic.” When everything from your decisions to your investments to your projects and assets is strategic, then what is strategy? We need to be a little more judicious about the use of that word. It’s not simply a synonym for important: not everything that is important is strategic. When you misuse or overuse the word, people start wondering why you need a strategy at all.

Then there’s the confusion between strategy and outcomes. I’ve heard people say their strategy is to have a 10 percent revenue increase and a 15 percent return on invested capital. That's not a strategy. Those are the results that you want to get out of your strategy. And it’s also really important to make the distinction between strategy and best practices that are really important to pursue but are unlikely to lead to a sustained competitive advantage.

W@W: You mentioned that the tools firms can use to create strategy and the concerns they need to take into account change, but the fundamentals of strategy have remained constant over time. How do you help leaders leverage core business strategy principles while adapting to evolving tools and shifting considerations?

NS: In both programs [Strategy and Management for Competitive Advantage and Effective Execution of Organizational Strategy] we provide people with a more structured way to think about these issues. It's not that people don't know about connectivity and mobile apps — of course they do. But how do they actually think about them in a systematic way? What does it mean for their company? What kind of strategy do they actually want to pursue? Likewise with environmental sustainability, it’s a big topic that involves regulation and customer and investor demands. But how do you think about it systematically? People come to the program for the set of tools we teach that they can really use to make some headway.

W@W: We’ve talked about what strategy is, and what it isn’t. But what if you have that straight, and you create a solid strategy, but you can’t get people to execute it?

NS: When another faculty member was retiring, I got the opportunity to create a new strategy-implementation program from scratch. It was fun, and a lot of work, designing a week that addresses the common challenges people face in implementing a project or an idea in a hands-on, applicable way. In a broad sense, creating the right motivation within organizations to get something done involves leadership, culture, incentives, and thinking about networks. Who do you need to talk to? Who are the key drivers to get it done? What are the resources you need to make it work? I picked our Wharton experts who are really knowledgeable about these issues and decided to ask participants to bring a current implementation problem to class.

All the exercises that we do throughout that week are applied to their own project. By the end of the program, they have a document in their hands that allows them to move that project forward. It’s usually a lot of fun because the participants focus their thinking about something that is truly relevant to them.

W@W: Teaching your MBA and executive education students, doing research, and working with individual firms probably doesn’t leave you with a lot of down time. But when you’re not working, where are you most likely to be and what are you doing?

NS: I like to play badminton, and for the last seven years or so I’ve been a Blue Apron-Hello Fresh kind of cook. Like I say in my Connected Strategy lectures, these meal-kit providers let me do what I enjoy. They removed the pain points of finding a recipe and grocery shopping. But honestly, my work is so varied and I find it fun. I get to do my own research on the academic side and the more practical, applied side, which is interesting. Then I get to teach some of the best students in the world, and teach executives and see whether the ideas that we have actually have some traction. I work with some companies directly. It’s why I was attracted to an academic career within a business school, and I can’t see myself doing anything else.