What executives do is come up with organizational values that indirectly result in the strategy they want. That's still incorrect. Microsoft didn't come up wit

What executives do is come up with organizational values that indirectly result in the strategy they want. That's still incorrect. Microsoft didn't come up with Internet Explorer because Bill Gates set some organizational values. They came up with Internet Explorer because Gates identified Netscape as an existential threat to the company and told his engineers and product managers to do whatever it took to come up with a viable response. Similarly, when Steve Jobs designed the original Macintosh (or, later, when he came up with the iPhone), he definitely had a strategy in mind. It wasn't some values-setting, which led to a lower-level engineer or product manager creating the product. Likewise, when Jeff Bezos sent out his famous communique [1] mandating that Amazon move to a service-oriented architecture, I'm pretty sure he had some idea of a strategy. I can keep going. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to spend 9 figures on a video-sharing site with no history of profitability and a massive potential copyright liabilities, I'm pretty sure they had a strategy in mind. Likewise, when Zuckerberg decided to spend ten-figures on a messaging app, I'm pretty sure he wasn't doing it to "set values". The entire category of mergers and acquisitions is inherently strategic -- companies only seek mergers when their CEOs have a specific strategic outcome in mind. [1]: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611