Three experiments

Citation

Randall, R.M. (2010), "Three experiments", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 38 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2010.26138aaa.001

Three experiments

Article Type: Editor’s letter From: Strategy & Leadership, Volume 38, Issue 1

This is the first issue of Volume 38, 2010. To avert the stodginess inherent in being almost 40 years old, we were motivated to attempt several innovations, some of the results of which appear in the issue. I thought readers and potential authors would be interested in reading why and how we conducted these particular experiments.

The first experiment involves soliciting an article about using a planning technique in a non-traditional way. Strategy & Leadership constantly searches for articles from thinkers and researchers with something useful and interesting to say about the changing business environment. As an example, for more than a year we have been imploring our friends at the Futures Strategy Group to write about their technology for using scenarios to manage in a recession, and they finally agreed. Their technique is unorthodox because it details how to use scenarios as a short-term planning tool.

But the topic we agreed they should undertake – scenarios for thinking about managing in the current economy and during the next year or two – involved undertaking a second experiment, one for speeding up the process of getting up-to-the minute ideas into print. It’s risky for journals to accept time-sensitive articles, because the long pre-publication schedule – sometimes a year, or more – makes it likely the articles will be outdated or wrong by the time they appear. To cut this delay, we began work on “Scenario planning for economic recovery: short-term decision making in a recession” while the issue was right on deadline and accomplished a full-scale peer review, edit and author’s revisions in just a few days. The cooperation of the reviewing team, which raced to decide whether to approve the article and also offer smart suggestions for improvement, was essential. The support and wise advice of the reviewers who participated in this rush project, and the forbearance of the authors who were cajoled to respond overnight to their requests, is much appreciated.

While collecting other material for this issue we discovered an opportunity to conduct a third experiment, this one into deciding at what stage it’s appropriate to publish research. As a rule of thumb, professional journals don’t publish research until it’s completed and can be fully vetted. But we decided to break the rules and use the interview format to jump in to a long-simmering controversy. For a number of years now we have been chatting with the critics of the research behind the so called “success study.” In simplest terms this is research that identifies a set of companies that has a significantly better success record than their peers and then studies them to determine what practices account for their winning ways. Over the years a number of the best selling business books of all time – from In Search of Excellence to Good to Great – have employed more or less this research model.

Now there’s a new challenger taking the field. Michael Raynor, a Deloitte consultant and researcher who has written some impressive books, is in the middle of a research effort called the “Persistence Project” that is applying best-practice statistical analysis to the success study. He believes that previous success studies are inherently flawed. Equally interesting, he is offering other researchers an opportunity to consult on his research in progress by setting up a website for comments and conversation – www.deloitte.com/us/persistence. This website dialogue is, in effect, a process of co-creation of value, a groundbreaking effort that we thought would interest a lot of people. So we interviewed Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed, a Deloitte principal, about their research in progress, at a time when they can’t, for competitive reasons, reveal many of the details. If you find the interview frustrating at points (for example, we’d all like to know the names of the companies that made their exclusive “Miracle Worker” list), that’s just the way it sometimes is with one-off experiments.

The title of this issue is “Expecting the unexpected,” and we hope the results of our experiments provide useful and sometimes surprising reading.

Robert M. RandallEditor