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Purpose Executive leadership plays a crucial role in initiating, shaping and directing strategic reorientations. But it must somehow mediate between forces of inertia and fundamental changes. This paper aims to address the unresolved paradox: how do executives address these conflicting demands? Design/methodology/approach This paper aims to interweave two streams of seminal research in organizational evolution and organizational culture to develop a typology of strategic reorientations. The four types of strategic reorientations are illustrated with the help of published cases and biographies of CEOs, mostly of high visibility international companies such as Heineken, Burger King and Starbucks. Findings Combinations of high and low levels of executive team consensus on its external adaptation tasks and on its internal integration tasks provoke four different types of strategic reorientations: chaotic, negotiated, muted and promising. Research limitations/implications Until appropriate methods of empirical research can be found to test this framework, one has to rely on some anecdotal support as preliminary and cursory evidence. This study can inform a wide body of research which incorrectly suggested that consensus among executives during strategic reorientation has a unidirectional, positive impact on organizational performance. Directions to explore how top executives may develop ambidextrous leadership are suggested. Practical implications Seeking high growth, executive teams must have a good mix of managerial and entrepreneurial cognitions. Therefore, executives having dissimilar skills and backgrounds should be inducted in the team periodically, instead of hiring hurriedly at the eleventh hour. Otherwise, the new executives may contribute too high or too low levels of consensus of each type needed for optimal strategic reorientation. Social implications The paper has not attempted this aspect. Originality/value This paper contributes a novel framework that combines two streams of seminal research, which, each by itself, would not sufficiently address the unresolved executive paradox.