New Framework — Now Available for Pre-Order
The Strategic Orientation Index™ is the first framework to integrate entrepreneurial orientation, market orientation, and entrepreneurial marketing into a single behavioral diagnostic. Built on doctoral research and field-tested with executive teams, it gives leaders a measurable way to close the gap between strategic intent and organizational behavior.
Sound familiar?
Different departments assess risk differently. Customer input is weighted unevenly. Priorities drift. Decisions get reopened. The plan looks clear on paper—but behavior across teams doesn’t match.
This pattern isn’t a leadership failure but simply a behavioral misalignment that existing frameworks weren’t designed to detect. Until now.
About the Author
Dr. Kyle J. Harkema is a scholar-practitioner whose work sits at the intersection of strategy, entrepreneurship, and organizational behavior. His doctoral research produced the Strategic Orientation Index™—the first diagnostic framework to integrate how firms think (EO), how they listen (MO), and how they act (EM) into a single measurable system. He has applied this framework inside live enterprises, across graduate-level strategy programs, and through executive facilitation—bridging the gap between academic rigor and operational impact.
Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) and MBA with 20+ years of executive marketing leadership.
Kyle is the creator of the Strategic Orientation Index™, a behavioral strategy diagnostic integrating Entrepreneurial Orientation, Market Orientation, and Entrepreneurial Marketing to explain why organizations succeed or stall in execution. The Strategic Orientation Index™ is being used in graduate strategy coursework at leading universities.
He is a distinguished practitioner, award-winning executive MBA educator and published researcher in entrepreneurial marketing, strategic decision-making, and the behavioral drivers of firm performance.
Vijay Govindarajan (Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, Coxe Distinguished Professor of Management, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth), Marshall Goldsmith (Thinkers50 #1 Executive Coach and bestselling author), Michael H. Morris (Professor, Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation, Keogh School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame), Charlene Li (New York Times bestselling author),
Patrick J. Murphy (Goodrich Endowed Chair for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, University of Alabama at Birmingham), Joe LiPuma (Philip Van Horn Gerdine Clinical Associate Professor in Global Business, Strategy and Innovation, Boston University), Michael Wiese (Professor of Marketing and Consultant, Point Loma Nazarene University), and validated in practice by CEOs including Mitch Kehler of KMC Controls.
Praise for Strategic Clarity
Strategic Clarity is one of those rare strategy books that actually makes complex ideas feel usable. Kyle Harkema takes big academic concepts—entrepreneurial mindset, market orientation, opportunity spotting—and breaks them down into clear, practical guidance leaders can apply right away. If you want a smarter, more grounded way to make strategic decisions without the usual buzzwords, this book is the one you’ll keep coming back to.
I've watched countless executives freeze, panic, or double down at exactly the wrong moment. Kyle's four-quadrant framework finally explains why—and more importantly, shows how to break these patterns. If you've ever wondered why your team's best thinking disappears during a crisis, read this book.
Strategic Clarity offers executives a clear, research grounded way to diagnose why strategy breaks down in behavior and how to fix it. A rare fusion of academic rigor and managerial clarity.
Great companies are simultaneously more market-driven and more entrepreneurial than competitors. Strategic Clarity brings new insights into how these two orientations can co-exist and reinforce one another, and the ways in which they produce transformative approaches to creating, reaching and serving markets.
World-class performance in entrepreneurial environments derives from adaptable models that harmonize with how firms think and act. Because successful firms must think and act in increasingly unique ways, the field of strategy needs new and dynamic firm-level approaches, like the one in this book, for use in both scholarly contexts and practical settings.
SOI gave our leadership team a shared language for issues we’d been feeling but couldn’t measure. It sparked one of the clearest and most productive strategic conversations we’ve had, and it’s already influencing how we operate. Practical, energizing, and exactly what mid-market companies need.
Harkema’s Strategic Clarity extends the work of gurus at the intersection of strategy content and process, combining theory with operational precision. He provides an elegant system for turning strategic intent into ubiquitous organizational behavior in a focused manner. A must read for founders and executives pursuing disciplined growth, especially in times of significant market and economic uncertainty and upheavals.
As both an academic and a practitioner in Marketing, I have come to believe that the philosophy of Marketing held individually and collectively in the organization directly guides the practice of Marketing. The material provided by Dr. Harkema is very valuable because it helps the person and the organizational leader diagnose the orientation that is shaping the practice of Marketing. The Strategic Orientation Index provides significant insights for business results. This is a resource that I want to use with my students and one that informs me as I work with organizations.
How it Works
Learn how Entrepreneurial Orientation, Market Orientation, and Entrepreneurial Marketing interact as behavioral constructs — and why misalignment between them silently erodes execution, regardless of industry or firm size.
Use the SOI™ scoring methodology to map your organization to one of five strategic personas. Identify whether growth struggles are strategy-based or behavior-based — and where the gaps are.
Apply persona-specific playbooks to close behavioral gaps, stabilize execution, and build the conditions research consistently links to sustained growth and profitability.
Why Now
The pace of disruption has outrun the tools most organizations use to stay aligned. Traditional strategy frameworks assess where to compete and why. SOI™ assesses something they were never designed to measure: how consistently your organization interprets and enacts strategy once it’s defined. The faster your environment moves, the more expensive that inconsistency becomes.
What Changes
Alignment gaps surfaced. Decision cycles shortened. A shared language for risk and customer signal established across the leadership team.
Faster cross-functional execution. Less initiative sprawl. Fewer executive surprises. More consistent customer-informed action.
Stronger leadership trust. Disciplined risk posture. Resilience under volatility. Compounding execution velocity.
Decades of peer-reviewed research link aligned entrepreneurial and market orientation to improved growth and profitability. SOI™ strengthens the behavioral conditions those outcomes depend on — providing an empirically grounded pathway from strategic intent to organizational performance.
Frequently Asked Questions
Most execution breakdowns aren’t caused by unclear strategy.
They’re caused by inconsistent strategic interpretation across the organization.
Different departments assess risk differently. Customer input is weighted unevenly. Priorities drift. Decisions get reopened.
That variance creates drag.
Strategic Clarity gives you a structured way to measure and reduce that variance before it shows up in missed targets or leadership churn.
Most strategy frameworks focus on why and where.
SOI focuses on how.
Specifically, how your organization interprets risk, customer signal, and responsiveness once strategy is defined.
Execution breaks when interpretation varies. SOI makes that variance measurable.
It doesn’t change your strategy. It stabilizes how it’s enacted.
SOI is a behavioral diagnostic built on three research domains:
It integrates them into a single system that measures how strategy is enacted across departments and leadership levels.
I look at impact across three horizons.
Short term (0–90 days): Clarity
Exposes alignment gaps. Reduces re-opened decisions. Sharpens prioritization. Establishes shared language around risk and customer signal.
Most firms underestimate behavioral variance until it’s measured.
Medium term (3–9 months): Execution Stability
Faster cross-functional execution. Less initiative sprawl. Fewer executive surprises. More consistent customer-informed action.
Variance decreases. Execution stabilizes.
Long term (9–24 months): Strategic Coherence
Stronger leadership trust. Disciplined risk posture. Resilience under volatility. Compounding execution velocity.
Coherence is what allows strategy to scale.
Decades of research link aligned entrepreneurial and market orientation to improved growth and profitability. SOI strengthens the behavioral conditions those outcomes depend on.
No.
It is research-grounded and field-tested.
SOI has been deployed inside a live mid-market enterprise across multiple departments and leadership levels, and used in graduate-level strategy formulation settings.
It is built for operational use.
No.
Culture is broad. SOI is specific and measurable.
It focuses narrowly on how strategy is interpreted and executed — not engagement or morale.
The quadrants summarize behavioral posture:
They are not labels. They are pattern summaries of how strategic behavior clusters inside a firm.
Hybrid means mixed strategic signals.
One function pushes risk. Another resists. One team listens deeply to customers. Another prioritizes internal logic.
Hybrid isn’t failure. It’s friction.
Left unresolved, friction compounds.
SOI improves what I call Return on Behavior.
It reduces execution variance and increases customer-informed prioritization.
Financial performance typically follows behavioral stability — not as a promise, but as a consequence of coordinated execution.
If:
Those are behavioral signals. SOI provides measurement and structure.
In stable markets, misalignment hides.
In volatile markets, it compounds.
The faster your environment moves, the more expensive inconsistent strategic behavior becomes.
The book provides clarity and language.
Organizations that want precision deploy the full SOI diagnostic, followed by targeted activation tied to measured gaps.
Get notified on launch day, plus early access to SOI™ resources and research updates.
