Christian Stadler is a Professor of Strategic Management at Warwick Business School and a member of the Editorial Board of the Strategic Management Journal and Strategic Organization. Through his research, Christian primarily examines long-term corporate sustainability — how companies grow, adapt, and beat their competitors through learning, innovating, and diversifying.

Together with Julia Hautz, Kurt Matzler, Stephan Friedrich von den Eichen, he recently published Open Strategy, a persuasive call to action for companies to “open up” their strategy process to people outside the C-suite — whether they are external customers, internal employees, or complete bystanders.

The authors argue that history is flooded with examples of companies, governments, and individuals who faced problems that could have been solved with openness — the book analyzes these examples to warrant the overall premise of opening up strategy.

In a conversation with Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, Christian discusses insights from the book and how open strategy can be used in all three elements of the strategic design process (ideation, formulation, execution).