How do readers benefit from these five interactions?

Citation

Randall, R.M. (2013), "How do readers benefit from these five interactions?", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 41 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2013.26141baa.002

How do readers benefit from these five interactions?

Article Type: Editor’s letter From: Strategy & Leadership, Volume 41, Issue 2

For more than 40 years Strategy & Leadership has operated as a co-op where leaders and thinkers with a strategic approach to management share their ideas and experiences and get feedback from their peers. The success of our editorial operations depends on five important interactions with researchers and practitioners.

We stimulate a flow of meaningful ideas. S&L’s editors, a mix of corporate veterans and senior academics, solicit articles from thought leaders in the field of strategic management. S&L maintains an ongoing conversation with hundreds of consultants, corporate leaders and academics who are interested in offering insight and advice to practitioners. But increasingly the world’s best talent has other choices – some of the newest being blogs, tweets, Linkedin, Spreecast, open manuscript publication and free websites. The back-and-forth dialog to persuade thought leaders to share their research-based findings with our readers is gratifying when we succeed and painful when they make other choices.

We advise authors. We also are offered quite a few unsolicited articles, but because of our limited resources we can only review those that would be useful and interesting to practitioners. The peer review process doesn’t just select a few articles for publication – it provides authors with advice from veteran practitioners. Sometimes we must make a decision on a manuscript that offers a fresh insight but needs a daunting amount of work to make it ready for publication. In these cases we search for a mentor who has the time to volunteer to work with the author.

We cook with a “secret” recipe. We work with authors to produce articles that conform to a specific editorial formula. These articles insightfully define a strategic management 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 examples or offer evidence that the proposed solution has worked or will work; provide a mini-case of the process in action; show results; list the how-to steps; note the pitfalls; and lay out next steps managers should take. We appreciate it when authors offering a particular approach to strategic management or viewpoint also consider and evaluate alternative approaches.

We add value. S&L’s team of editors is skilled at making substantive improvements. Though the feedback these veteran strategists give authors can be tough and candid, the authors are getting the benefit of advice from people with the same interests and needs as discerning readers. The goal of our peer reviews and our editing is to offer a publication that is customer-focused; each article should address the readers’ actual problems and opportunities. We also believe our readers deserve a jargon-free journal. To accomplish this, the editors whack out the gobbledygook and press authors to provide specifics about results and best practices. And we constantly struggle to make the distinction between cutting-edge ideas and those that are passing fads.

We prize evidence. Unlike some journals, we search avidly for case studies of best practice strategic management. We want cases that candidly explore problems, strategic choices, tools used, the implementation process and results. For our articles, we strive to publish evidenced-based concepts that are relevant to management decision making. Sometimes the first-person experience of thought leaders provides the best evidence of what tools and techniques are successful, so we also publish interviews with innovators and implementers.

Readers who adopt a strategic management approach must simultaneously lay the foundation for their organization’s success tomorrow while striving to outmaneuver rivals in today’s competitive arena. They need to know how the latest tools, models, and techniques of strategic management produce competitive advantage now and in the future. Through our interactions with the strategic management community – corporate leaders, researchers and consultants – S&L provides a dynamic forum for sharing insights about tool use and best practice.

The net result, we hope, is a stream of critical knowledge about how to attract and retain valuable customers, to experiment and adapt rapidly in continuously changing markets, and to position organizations advantageously for the future. If we do our job right, readers should make a “To do” list of actions to take after reading each issue.

Robert M. RandallEditor