Editor's note

Citation

(2004), "Editor's note", Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 25 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jbs.2004.28825aaa.001

Editor's note

Fun comes to business strategy! You just may laugh out loud at the latest innovation from the Journal of Business Strategy. Starting with this issue, we are serializing Clean Business Cuisine Now and Z/yen by Michael Mainelli and Ian Harris. No other business journal can boast of a comparable coup, but we persuaded Michael, who heads Z/yen, a London-based consulting firm, to let us serialize his and Ian's contribution to business literature.

In the nineteenth century, it was common for leading journals to serialize books. Many of the greatest books first appeared in successive issues of magazines. George Eliot's Middlemarch debuted in America, for example, in Harper's Weekly in December 1871 and each week thereafter until February 1873. David Copperfield was originally published in 19 monthly parts in 1849 and 1850.

Now JBS adds Clean Business Cuisine to those other vaunted serials. First published in the UK in 2000, the little red book has received quite a few pleasant reviews, mostly from editors and journalists relieved to be able to laugh at what they might otherwise be crying over – business scandal, strategy and pomposity. Despite the book's success in the UK, it has had minimal distribution in the USA. JBS thought it would be unfair to deprive its US readers of what is certainly global humor. Michael Mainelli, in fact, is an American living and working in London. A graduate of Harvard, he obtained a doctorate from the London School of Economics. His co-author, Ian Harris, has a secret life writing humor for the BBC when he is not at his day job at Z/yen.

Even during my own short tenure as editor of JBS, I have encountered quite a bit of nonsense writing in the business strategy field. So it is not surprising that, by the time he had been in business for ten years or so, Michael says he felt a growing frustration with the silliness of many management theories. In the 1980s, as a principal with a major accounting firm, he surveyed 183 UK companies on how they used strategic planning. It turned out there was absolutely no correlation between whether or how a company used strategic planning and its performance. In another survey, he examined more than 30 schools of management thought and methods of planning. Not one was predictive. So much for the silver bullet. Michael is convinced that devotion to the business theory of the moment replaces original thinking in tackling many business issues.

In keeping with the tongue-in-cheek flavor of our book serialization, we must call attention to the clever piece by regular columnist Patrick Marren on the importance of mediocrity. There is much to be said in its favor.

We have two articles on corporate governance – entirely fitting given the intense scrutiny the subject commands recently. Professors Daily and Dalton, our columnists, outline the various ratings systems for corporate boards. According to Willy Sussland, a consultant from Geneva, Switzerland who works primarily with European boards, ratings for boards would implicitly be higher if board members understood more about a concept he calls "business value".

Rob Docters and three of his colleagues begin a series on pricing in this issue. He became interested in specializing in price analysis and strategy during a project his then-firm, Booz Allen and Hamilton, had undertaken for Jack Welch and GE. The article in this issue of JBS concerns pricing in a downturn, which may seem an aberration in light of the good US economic news. But since the cycle will undoubtedly turn downward at some point, every company needs an arsenal of tools for pricing flexibility in any environment.

Donald Mitchell and Carol Bruckner Coles, the team who wrote the last issue's piece on continuing business model innovation, carry through with a second piece on innovation. Their article is packed with examples of companies that broke out of the mold and took chances on new business models.

Our other articles, on topics from global branding to innovation in small businesses, all add up to an issue filled with original thought and contributions from business strategy experts.