Editor’s letter

Citation

Randall, R.M. (2012), "Editor’s letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 40 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2012.26140eaa.001

Editor’s letter

Article Type: Editor’s letter From: Strategy & Leadership, Volume 40, Issue 5

Strategy & Leadership is celebrating its 40th birthday all year. Recently, at the Association of Strategic Planning annual conference in Chicago some friends and contributing editors marked our anniversary with a cake and a toast.

Each issue this year has also been the occasion for a bit of a celebration. In this one, Vol. 40, No. 5, we can brag about inducing several world-renown strategists to share their insights. Pardon our name dropping, but we thought you’d like to meet them.

Near the top of many peoples’ list of the world’s leading management thinkers is Vijay Govindarajan, Professor of International Business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and Chief Innovation Consultant at General Electric. In his article “Reverse innovation: a global growth strategy that could pre-empt disruption at home” he and co-author Chris Trimble explain a counterintuitive concept that revolutionizes disruptive innovation strategy. As he succinctly explains, “Historically, multinationals innovated in rich countries and sold these products in poor countries. Reverse innovation is doing the opposite.”

In “Gary Hamel: managing while under the influence of innovation” the noted strategist considers the future of management in an interview with S&L Contributing Editor Stephen Denning. Some sample quotes: “Every industry in the world is being reinvented from the customer backwards … We will see a revolution in management over the next decade that will be more profound than anything we have seen in the last hundred years … You can’t really have the freedoms that are implied in capitalism without a very strong ethical foundation. Without it, capitalism simply becomes license.”

Adam Kahane has guided hundreds of teams of people working together to change the future. These teams have tackled some of the most important and difficult challenges of our time: health care, economic development, and climate change across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Australia. His article, “Transformative scenario planning: changing the future by exploring alternatives,” describes a methodology that enables people to collaboratively transform, rather than adapt to, a situation. It centers on constructing scenarios of a dire future to reach a collective understanding of how it could be positively influenced.

Strategy & Leadership achieved the ripe old age of 40 by searching out how-to articles that offer senior management new insight on how to tackle a problem, dilemma, or opportunity and that describe in detail the model, tool, technique or concept that enables the solution. Three articles in this issue do just that:

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  In “Strategic dashboards: designing and deploying them to improve implementation,” Michael K. Allio urges leaders to champion a broader process that changes how the dashboard is designed, positioned and deployed across the organization to unlock this tool’s true potential.

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  In “A model for strategy implementation and conflict resolution in the franchise business,” Paul J. Davis offers a novel 7Cs approach to improving strategy implementation in franchise companies – through communication, cooperation, consultation, collaboration, coordination, concession and competence.

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  In “Dynamic models for managing big decisions,” A.T. Kearney consultants Hanjo Arms, Mathias Wiecher and Valeska Kleiderman describe a new approach to analyzing critical resource investment decisions, Dynamic Decision Making, a sophisticated modeling process that can reduce risk, add flexibility and improve transparency of “bet the company” strategic moves.

Good reading,

Robert M. RandallEditor