Felix Oberholzer-Gee

Why organisations work with Felix Oberholzer-Gee

• His Value Stick reduces competitive strategy to two quantifiable variables – customer willingness-to-pay and employee willingness-to-sell – giving leadership teams a data-driven basis for ranking strategic priorities rather than accumulating them.
• His central argument – that consistent outperformers do fewer things, not more things – gives boards and strategy teams a principled case for simplification that does not read as retreat or reduced ambition.
• The framework is designed to be cascaded across an organisation, not held at the strategy function level; it has been used in HBS executive programmes including the Harvard General Management Program and validated by senior practitioners including the CEOs of Michelin and Google X.
• His research base spans top-tier peer-reviewed economics journals (American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy) and two decades of HBS executive teaching, so the framework holds under board-level scrutiny and works in a workshop setting.
• As co-host of After Hours on the TED Audio Collective with Youngme Moon and Mihir Desai, he brings the same analytical rigour to live, public business questions – signalling a communicator as well as a researcher.

Biography highlights

• Andreas Andresen Professor of Business Administration, Strategy Unit, Harvard Business School – member of faculty since 2003
• Author: Better, Simpler Strategy: A Value-Based Guide to Exceptional Performance (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021)
• Creator of the Value Stick framework, taught in HBS MBA and executive programmes including the Harvard General Management Program
• Faculty Chair: Driving Digital Strategy; Senior Executive Leadership Program for China; Managing Turbulence – Harvard Business School
• HBS Class of 2006 Faculty Teaching Award (best teacher in core curriculum); 2002 Helen Kardon Moss Anvil Award, Wharton School
• Research published in American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Financial Economics, and Journal of Law and Economics
• Co-host of After Hours, TED Audio Collective, alongside HBS professors Youngme Moon and Mihir Desai
• Former faculty member, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; former Managing Director, Symo Electronics (Switzerland)

Biography

Felix Oberholzer-Gee has spent more than two decades at Harvard Business School making a counterintuitive argument: the organisations that consistently outperform their rivals are doing fewer things than their competitors, not more. His work is less a critique of strategic planning than a dismantling of the assumption that better strategy means broader strategy.

The tool at the centre of his approach is the Value Stick, a framework he developed through research and refined through HBS executive programmes. It measures competitive performance through two variables: customer willingness-to-pay at one end, and employee and supplier willingness-to-sell at the other. The gap between them is the value a firm creates. Any initiative that does not widen that gap, his research shows, is a drain on competitive advantage rather than a contribution to it.

That argument is the basis of Better, Simpler Strategy (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021), endorsed in practice by the CEOs of Michelin and Google X. The framework is data-driven and designed to work at every level of an organisation – from board-level portfolio decisions to operational choices about talent and supplier relationships. Oberholzer-Gee holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Zurich and has served in senior leadership roles at HBS, including chair of the MBA programme and Senior Associate Dean for the school’s global research centers.

His research has been published in the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy, and covered by the Financial Times, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. As co-host of After Hours on the TED Audio Collective, he applies the same analytical approach to business and culture questions with a wide public audience – extending the reach of his strategic thinking well beyond the executive classroom.

Key speaking topics

• Value-based competitive strategy
• The Value Stick framework and willingness-to-pay analysis
• Strategic focus and initiative prioritisation
• Digital transformation and value creation
• Non-market strategy and competitive positioning
• Business performance in digital and disrupted markets
• Global competition and the Chinese economy

Ideal for

• Chief Strategy Officers and corporate strategy teams choosing between competing strategic priorities
• Boards and senior leadership teams evaluating competitive positioning
• Executive education cohorts focused on general management and commercial strategy
• Leadership teams in digitally disrupted sectors reassessing the value they create for customers and talent

Audience outcomes

• A single, quantifiable framework for assessing whether a strategic initiative creates or destroys competitive value
• Clarity on how to reduce strategic complexity without reducing strategic ambition
• A practical method for mapping competitive advantage through willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-sell
• Sharper criteria for deciding which initiatives to pursue and which to cut
• A common language for strategy discussions that can be applied consistently across business units and leadership levels