Vistage Executive Leadership Program
In Collaboration with Stanford Graduate School of Business
Application deadline for the March 31
cohort is February 28, 2025.
Cohorts Start March 31, 2025
An exclusive opportunity to spark innovation and energize your company.
Vistage is collaborating with the Stanford Graduate School of Business to offer this exclusive program combining world-class curriculum with the unique Vistage experience. Specifically tailored for Vistage CEO members, this Strategic Leadership course is delivered online by the Stanford faculty and applied through an engaging peer environment.
This experience will help you:
- Improve strategic thinking and strategy formulation.
- Stimulate value creation and value capture.
- Enrich execution capabilities to drive better results.
- Strengthen leadership through strategic change.
This course helped me scale my company. I’ve updated my strategic plan and everyone is on board. It is now part of our hiring process, so each new hire knows where we are going, why and how we are going to get there.”
Sandra James
CEO, Private Eyes, Inc.
Vistage member since 2016
About the Strategic Leadership Course
This course helps you learn to think strategically: how to identify opportunities and challenges, how to develop a viable course of action, and how to execute strategy so that your team is guided and motivated to achieve success. With a combination of online self-paced learning, a live session with Stanford faculty, and workshops facilitated by expert Vistage Chairs, the program focuses on honing strategic thinking skills and applying them to your business.
The course consists of eight individual one-week modules, each with an assignment. Curriculum is delivered through readings, videos, case studies, and small team projects, as well as cohort-wide feedback and discussions. Member feedback suggests they spent approximately five hours per week on course material. Catch-up weeks are inserted throughout the course to accommodate the busy lives of active executives, spreading the eight modules over 12 weeks.
| Course Modules | Learning Objectives |
|---|---|
| Module 1 Discovering Strategy | Describe the strategy formation process and identify strategic emergence. Explore sensemaking as a function of leadership in the strategy process. Describe the value of strategic planning for both external and internal audiences. Define key strategic concepts. |
| Module 2 Understanding Firm’s Performance | Explain the difference between mission and strategy, and how they relate to the types of value that organizations create. Provide a definition of economic value creation and the concepts of willingness to pay and opportunity cost. Explain the reasons why organizations might not capture the value they create, and who might capture the value instead. Describe and give examples of the four primary obstacles to capturing value. |
| Module 3 Sources of Advantage | Define a value creation advantage and explain how it contributes to securing an organization’s economic prosperity. Explain how the concept of a value creation advantage relates to the tradeoff between cost and perceived quality. Describe positioning advantage. Explain how it allows an organization to capture a greater share of the value it creates. Articulate how organizations might have a bargaining advantage or disadvantage with buyers or suppliers. |
| Module 4 Delivering on Capabilities | Identify organizational capabilities. Evaluate a company’s organization using the PARC Framework. Describe the alignment between a company’s organizational capabilities and its strategy. Identify competency traps and determine how to correct them. |
| Module 5 Network Effects and Marketplace | Explain differences between intrinsic benefits and network benefits. Give examples of two-sided marketplaces, and explain the unique dynamics of network effects in such settings. Discuss the unique strategic concerns that an operator of a two-sided marketplace might face. Give examples of the strategic implications of indirect network effects for the operator of technology platforms. |
| Module 6 Innovation | Describe the connection between failure and innovation. Explain the difference between an exploration strategy and an exploitation strategy. Develop a plan to increase non-consensus innovations. Define the VSR framework. |
| Module 7 Strategy Formulation | Explain why filtering between different strategic proposals and innovative ideas is a core leadership challenge. Discuss the consequences for the strategy formulation process of failing to manage the filtering challenge successfully. Explain why focusing on what has to be true is a more effective approach to debating strategic alternatives. |
| Module 8 Strategic Change | Explain why discontinuous changes in technology are difficult for organizations. Describe what makes a change disruptive to an organization and describe sources of structural inertia. Develop recommendations for improving your organization’s existing strategy. Apply concepts, frameworks, and skills that you’ve learned in this course to your own organization. |
Ronn Cort
Former President, KYDEX, LLC
“I learned a different way of thinking and was able to apply it immediately.”
Meet the Professors
William P. Barnett
The Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Business Leadership, Strategy, and Organizations
Jesper B. Sørensen
The Robert A. and Elizabeth R. Jeffe Professor, and Professor of Organizational Behavior
Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
Why are some companies more competitive than others? To be successful, a manager must be able to diagnose the reasons behind successes and failures, and to be able to effectively improve performance in the future. Our goal in this course is to hone your strategic thinking skills so that this thought process becomes second nature.
Improve your strategic thinking skills by being part of this program.
Application deadline for the March 31 cohort is February 28, 2025.
Frequently asked questions
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