Strategic cores and magnificent obsessions: Discovering strategy formation through daily activities of ceos

Obsessions play an important role in strategic management: this paper shows how they establish causality between intention and action. Following 1 month of continuous, direct observation of CEOs at work, strategies were revealed to be intentional: by their activities the CEOs generated a strategic core consistent with their preoccupations. The Magnificent Obsessions latent in their preoccupations appeared as a common element in all their activities and served as a key to understanding their compulsion to address certain issues over others.