A short history of Strategy & Leadership and the strategic management community that supports it

Citation

Allio, R.J. (2012), "A short history of Strategy & Leadership and the strategic management community that supports it", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 40 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2012.26140aaa.002

A short history of Strategy & Leadership and the strategic management community that supports it

Article Type: Guest Editor’s letter From: Strategy & Leadership, Volume 40, Issue 1

Robert J. Allio

For this first issue of the 40th volume of Strategy & Leadership, Robert J. Allio, first editor of S&L’s precursor publication, Planning Review, offers a guided tour of the trip along our learning curve.

In early 1972, a small squad of corporate planners and academics created an ambitious newsletter called Planning Review (Exhibit 1) to further the intellectual needs of the brand new North American Corporate Planning Society (NASCP), an association of some 800 members. I took over as editor and publisher as this publication became a journal for the growing ranks of planning executives and managers. What Contributing Editor Malcolm Pennington and I learned from wrangling manuscripts and the evolving practice of management produced two well-received books, Corporate Planning: Techniques and Applications (1979), and Corporate Planning (1986).

Over the years, the NASCP merged with the Planning Executives Institute (PEI), and later the surviving association was rebranded as the Strategic Leadership Forum, a community of planning executives that at its peak had some 6,000 members. And Planning Review was rebranded too as Strategy & Leadership, which now arrives on desktops and computers around the globe in the form of issue #1 of the 40th volume of the journal. Mirabile dictu!

Exhibit 1 The first 1972 issue of Planning Review, a newsletter that evolved into Strategy & Leadership

This current issue is quite a bit different from the first breezy 12-pager, printed in black and white with articles illustrated by some of the world’s major contemporary artists like Folon and Mihaesco, famous for their ironic assessment of the dilemmas of modern executives. In those days, our stalwart crew of editors and reviewers – Pennington (a consultant who would become one of the first Americans to be a director of a Japanese company), Rutgers professor Milton Leontiades, executives Walter Blass of ATT, Rudy Knoepfel of Solvay American, and George Sawyer of Hoffmann-LaRoche – lived or worked in the New York area, and we met regularly to critique manuscripts and plan the next issue. Today our editorial board and our squadron of reviewers, like our readership, reside and work around the globe.

As part of the founding gang forty years ago, I marvel at our longevity. Much credit is due the editor who succeeded me, Liam Fahey, who helped build Strategy & Leadership’s reputation among the academic community while maintaining its focus on the needs of corporate leaders. Our current leader, Robert Randall, a Time/Life writer/editor when he helped us get started, took the reins as the long-time managing editor, and for the past decade has served as editor-in-chief. He and Liam Fahey have shared much of what they learned as editors in several books – Learning from the Future (1998) and The Portable MBA in Strategy 1st Edition (1994) and 2nd Edition (2001), which have been translated into Chinese, French and Portuguese for planners around the world.

Much of the credit for S&L’s growth and success is due its team of Contributing Editors, a veteran group of practitioners and academics, listed on S&L’s masthead, who have participated in the ongoing corporate battles between opportunism and planning, the skirmishes over good strategy and bad strategy and the struggle to distinguish legitimate innovations in practice from fads.

Many names of current and former team members also deserve special mention for their role in our success – Catherine Gorrell, editor of the “Quick takes” column for more than a decade, former editor Marilyn Norris, former art director Ner Beck, and two of our late friends, designer Richard Hess and long-time copy editor Barbara Shor. Many of our Editorial Board members – Gary Hamel, B. Joseph Pine II, Saul Berman, George Day, Richard Pascale, Ian Wilson, Kathryn Harrigan, Darrell Rigby, Bala Chakravarthy and the late C.K. Prahalad – also contributed groundbreaking articles and they, like all our contributors, have earned our gratitude.

So what have we learned over the past 40 years that can help our current readers?

1. 1.

   Good ideas are hard to find. Rare are the corporate planners who are willing to detail the successes and failures of innovations in practice, the academics who do original field research aimed at helping executives perform and the consultants who are willing to expand the boundaries of knowledge by sharing their “secret sauce.” But consider: scarcity boosts value.

2. 2.

   So good manuscripts will always be scarce. But self-promotional books and advertorials abound, and the idea-to-ink ratio still disappoints. This why Strategy & Leadership’s experienced reviewers produce a competitive advantage for the publication. As the tsunami of submissions and books has increased, we continue to learn from our tough reviewers. They were recruited because they are practitioners who are eager to find genuine solutions to their own problems and those of their colleagues, but who can quickly spot the hucksters of the strategic-management equivalent of snake oil. We owe them.

3. 3.

   The Internet has changed everything. Executives and authors now have virtual instantaneous access to everything ever written in any language. We look forward to the day when the twitterati generation can discern the difference between the purveyors of genuine innovation in practice and charlatanism and announce their finding in 140 well-chosen-character tweets before any damage is done. If one result of the social-media phenomenon is that it enables a group to speedily distinguish good strategy from bad strategy, we’re all for it.

4. 4.

   Community is essential. Strategy & Leadership owes its genesis to a tiny community of planners centered in the New York City area. It expanded to serve a national organization, survived when that organization collapsed and now its proprietary website has a potential audience of 20 million subscribers throughout the world. But its intellectual strength is still fostered by a small number of discerning volunteers who strive to find pioneering articles while avoiding fads.

5. 5.

   Our article model serves organization leaders. “Strategy & Leadership articles, cases and columns insightfully define a strategic management or leadership problem, dilemma, or opportunity from the perspective of senior management; propose a creative solution to the problem or a way to take advantage of the opportunity; describe the model, tool, technique or concept that enables the solution; show evidence or examples that the proposed solution has worked or could work; provide a mini-case of the process in action; show results; list the how-to steps and describe how to perform a diagnostic; note the pitfalls; and lay out next steps.”

In an editorial in that first issue of Planning Review I lauded the role of planners as “gadflies, critics of the status quo, and futurists, seers of times to come.” In the years since, some companies have assigned the planning function to a Chief Innovation Officer or Chief Imagination Officer and expanded the CEO job to include the roles of Visionary Leader, Strategist Leader and Head Planner. So maybe it’s time that planners rebranded as Informed Questioners, searching for answers that enable an organization to see where it is, where it needs to go and what it needs to do to get there in the shortest amount of time with the available resources.

As an invitation to our current readers, I know that the editor, Robert Randall, would be glad to hear from practitioners and academics who would like to become reviewers, and from potential submitters who would like to become part of our community, still thriving after all these years.