Editor’s letter

Citation

Randall, R.M. (2022), "Editor’s letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 50 No. 4, p. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-07-2022-232

The depth of strategic management experience and the many accomplishments of the authors in this issue are noteworthy.

In his interview, “The power of questioning conventional models in management practice,” Roger Martin, one of the world’s leading management thinkers and a trusted adviser to the CEOs of many global companies, maintains that “The most important question in strategy is: “What would have to be true for this possibility to be successful?”

Martin’s latest book, A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Management Effectiveness, offers many of his most influential insights across a wide range of management challenges and practices. His interviewer is Brian Leavy, Emeritus Professor of Strategy at Dublin City University Business School and a Strategy & Leadership contributing editor. They discuss the practice of Martin’s professional career goal, “Helping managers abandon badly functioning models by explicitly challenging conventional thinking and offering them a newer, better model.”

In his article “How measurement makes ‘Deep Purpose’ work,” Stephen Denning, the author of The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management, explains that, “To serve as an effective guide to management practice, a firm’s purpose must relate to how the firm actually operates, and how it prioritizes its treatment of its stakeholders.” According to Denning’s reporting, “The most successful firms today—such as Amazon, Apple and Microsoft—have discovered that the secret to effective purpose is to give primacy to the noble goal of creating value for customers.” And most importantly, measure the activities required.

Wharton professor Paul J.H. Schoemaker’s article, “How to prepare for ten process and content challenges of scenario planning,” warns that “Scenario planners likely need to unshackle themselves from their current mindsets when trying to divine how consumers, media, rivals or political leaders might behave in the future.” In the process of doing such scenario work, “It’s important to distinguish between process challenges on the one hand and content pitfalls on the other.” Professor Schoemaker’s latest book is Advanced Introduction to Scenario Planning.

Reporting on the finding of interviews with some 3000 CEOs in their 2022 study, IBM Institute for Business Value researchers Haynes Cooney, Jacob Dencik and Anthony Marshall found “that 53 percent of organizations will position environmental sustainability as a top business priority by 2024 … . But only 37 percent have aligned sustainability objectives with their business strategies.” They describe how leading firms are meeting this challenge in their article, “Making the responsibility for practicing sustainability a company-wide strategic priority.”

In their article, “Why CEOs need to make supplier strategy and procurement leadership imperatives,” Boston Consulting Group partners Christian Schuh, Wolfgang Schnellbaercher, Alenka Triplat and Daniel Weise assert that “CEOs should work closely with their suppliers to reconfigure the procurement process, redesign the supply chain and reengineer the product-development process.” A critical strategic benefit: “Companies that pool their resources with their suppliers can successfully co-develop innovative products.”

Good reading!