“In the past few years, the number of CSO appointments has surged,” according to a 2007 Harvard Business Review article.  Many reasons account for why CEO’s are adding the CSO position into top management hierarchies, including complex organizational structures, rapid globalization, new regulations, the struggle to innovate.  It is virtually impossible today for CEOs to be on top of everything, even an area as important as strategic planning and execution.  Since strategy formulation, implementation, and monitoring has become a continuous, not periodic, process, successful execution depends more than ever on rapid and effective decision making.  Harvard Business School professor Joseph Bower recently said: “iron-fisted control of execution often eludes the top team’s grasp, as line executives seek to define strategy on their own terms.”  Increasingly therefore, “a CEO needs an executive near at hand to share the load and maintain—or regain—control of a process that constantly threatens to become chaotic.” The COO or the CFO may seem like obvious positions to roll strategic planning duties and responsibilities, but there are risks in delegating the oversight of strategy to either a COO or a CFO. Nearly three decades ago, Wommack explained why strategic management duties and responsibilities should not be folded into the COO’s duties.  He explained that:  “a fundamental conflict between what is easy to execute and what is right to execute often leads the COO away from the tougher decision.”  Alternatively, to fold strategic planning activities into a CFO position carries even more perilous risks, since that person is focused on the financial and accounting practices of the firm.  Thus, more and more large businesses especially are adding a CSO position to be responsible for successful strategy formulation, implementation, and evaluation.

Source:  http://hbr.org/2007/10/the-chief-strategy-officer/ar/1.  Also, Joseph Bower and Clark Gilbert, “How Managers’ Everyday Decisions Create—or Destroy—Your Company’s Strategy,” Harvard Business Review, February 2007.  Also, William Wommack, “The Board’s Most Important Function,” Harvard Business Review, September–October 1979).