Editor’s letter

Citation

Randall, R.M. (2007), "Editor’s letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 35 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2007.26135aaa.001

Editor’s letter

The theme of this issue is “integrating competitive and marketing intelligence into the strategic thinking process.” The two articles in this issue that address this topic are:

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  “Connecting strategy and competitive intelligence: Refocusing intelligence to produce critical strategy inputs” by Liam Fahey.

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  “Intelligence teams” by Liam Fahey and Jan Herring.

To understand the full context of these current articles, readers need to look back at the previous issue of Strategy & Leadership at two articles on competitive intelligence:

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  “The model for integrating strategy and intelligence: the Executive Intelligence Officer” by Mark Little and Liam Fahey.

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  “Using tactical intelligence to help inform strategy” by Martha Culver.

Together the four articles form the foundation of a leadership education program on the best practices in managing competitive intelligence – a world class mini seminar, without the plane ride, overnight stay and fee. Special thanks are due Liam Fahey, a Strategy & Leadership Acquisitions Editor, who worked closely with industry experts to develop the four competitive intelligence articles. In addition to him, I owe special thanks to two S&L Contributing Editors who contributed an article and a column to this issue – John Sterling (who enlisted Charles Murray, Managing Director of DuPont’s Intellectual Assets and Licensing Business as co-author) and Stephen Millett.

Editor’s choices

Some lessons I learned from this issue that I’d like to highlight for readers:

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  How leaders can ensure that competitive and market intelligence will be integral to top level discussions about strategy.

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  How intelligence teams should be organized so they can effectively improve strategy making and updating.

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  How leaders need to let new innovation processes and systems evolve so disruptive innovation can take hold.

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  Why there’s an art to managing intellectual property, and what the three critical success factors are.

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  How SKU reduction can be a strategic process that generates big wins.

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  And how multinational companies might be able to win the coming duke-it-out with China.

One bit of housekeeping

In Strategy & Leadership Volume 34, Number 4, several articles contained serious production errors – specifically:

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  “Strategic thinking: the ten big ideas” by Robert J. Allio.

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  “Building an innovative organization: consistent business and technology integration” by Marc Chapman.

The publisher has assured me that corrected versions of these articles are available online at www.emeraldinsight.com/sl.htm. The publisher and I apologize for the errors.

Whether you go online or turn the pages I’m certain that you’ll discover that there’s lots more good reading the editorial team has prepared for you!

Robert M. RandallEditor