Management teams see strategic initiatives as efficient answer to pressing challenges. Managing initiatives, however, is perceived as highly complex by most managers. To lower the high degree of causal ambiguity in the relationship between contextually induced strategy-making and the performance of strategic initiatives Wolfgang Kaltenbrunn develops a dynamic model and derives three hypotheses. The statistical analyses confirm both the validity of the theoretical model and the significance of all hypotheses. Finally, the author infers concrete recommendations for managerial practice from this PhD thesis´s statistical results.

While working as a capital investment controller in Munich, Dr. Wolfgang Kaltenbrunn (born in 1979), completed his doctoral thesis at the University of St. Gallen under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Günter Müller-Stewens at the Institute of Management at the University of St. Gallen.