The Harvard Business Review article You Should Be Able to Boil Your Strategy Down to a Single Clear Visualization, authored by João Cotter Salvado, Professor at CATÓLICA-LISBON, and Freek Vermeulen, Professor at London Business School, has been recognised as one of Harvard Business Review’s 10 most read articles of 2025.
According to João Cotter Salvado, “I am deeply honoured by this international recognition. This article reinforces my commitment to impactful research. Our goal is to show that strategy is not about oversimplifying, but about transforming complex ideas into something clear and actionable.”
The article analysed 654 CEO presentations on acquisitions in the United States and sought to identify the factors that lead investors to respond more favourably to such presentations. The findings reveal that the decisive element is the inclusion of a clear and compelling visualisation of the organisation’s strategic intent, highlighting the growing importance of clarity, coherence and visual representations in executive decision-making and strategic communication. Furthermore, the article explains how to design effective visual representations that promote strategic alignment and a shared understanding among employees and investors.
The article demonstrates that the way strategy is communicated can be just as important as the strategic plan itself. Drawing on the concept of sensemaking, the authors argue that strategy relies on cognitive maps that organise choices, resources, customers and cause-and-effect relationships. Visualising these maps facilitates the transition from sensemaking to sensegiving, helping investors and employees understand the strategic logic and act accordingly. Within this framework, the article highlights five fundamental design principles that make strategic visualisation effective:
1. Organising the strategy around three or four core, interconnected concepts that form the foundation of strategic reasoning;
2. Introducing progressive levels of detail that connect abstract strategic decisions to their practical implications;
3. Using colour and shading sparingly, solely to distinguish levels of information;
4. Explaining cause-and-effect relationships through visual flows that clearly show how different strategic elements influence one another;
5. Favouring a horizontal layout, enabling more intuitive reading aligned with how the human brain processes visual information.
The main conclusion is that strategic clarity does not arise from excessive simplification, but from the ability to make complexity understandable and actionable, generating measurable impacts both on market perception and on strategy implementation. To learn more about this article, click here.