Companies can gain an advantage from anticipating their competitors’ strategic moves. Yet companies change their strategies for a host of reasons, some external, such as broad economic changes or competitors’ moves, and some internal, such as the results of a strategic planning process. This survey asked executives from around the world about the strategic choices they made in the previous year and about a single strategic initiative their company undertook spontaneously for any reason other than responding to competitors’ moves:¹ the impetus for the initiative; the initiative’s goal and how the initiative differed from the old strategy; the company’s performance before the change; the amount of time devoted to planning and implementing the new initiative; and the degree to which this initiative was typical of the company’s strategic initiatives.

The results indicate that astute companies have a solid chance to figure out what kinds of strategic initiatives their competitors will undertake spontaneously and when they’ll act. For example, 82 percent of respondents say their company’s largest strategic move in the past year was a logical next step in their existing strategy. Further, when asked about the single biggest strategic initiative their company had undertaken spontaneously in the past five...