Editor’s letter

Citation

(2023), "Editor’s letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 51 No. 4, pp. 1-2. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-07-2023-256

• The strategist’s purview needs to extend to execution

• IBM’s Ginni Rometty: portrait of a leader learning to use “Good power”

• Opportunity mapping: locating the upside of risk

• Finding CEO candidates to lead growth through innovation

• Using “CEO-speak” to prioritize a safety culture

• Building threat resilience into ecosystem strategy

The authors and articles in this issue are:

• “The strategist’s view needs to extend beyond planning to execution” by Timothy J. Galpin, Senior Lecturer of Strategy and Innovation, and Director of the Postgraduate Diploma in Strategy and Innovation at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, warns that “No matter how brilliant or elegant a strategy is, it is worthless until effectively implemented.” Professor Galpin, the author of The Strategist’s Handbook: Tools, templates, and best practices across the Strategy process, reports that “The biggest need highlighted by the Oxford Strategy Insights Project is effective strategy execution.”

• In his article “IBM’s Ginni Rometty: portrait of a leader learning to use ‘Good power,’” Brian Leavy, emeritus professor of strategy at Dublin City University Business School, shows how her “Leadership development journey closely parallels those of the leaders on which the classic authentic leadership research is based.” This Masterclass examines Rometty’s personal “memoir with purpose,” Good Power: Leading Positive Change in our Lives, Work, and World, as a learning journey that illuminates the authentic leadership perspective more generally.

• “Opportunity mapping: locating the upside of risk through visual mapping” by Tyler Case, an Assistant Professor, Department of Management and Marketing, Edwards School of Business, University of Saskatchewan, offers a novel 5-by-5 opportunity mapping matrix framework to link the standard practice of business risk mapping matrices with the innovative method of opportunity mapping. The methodology is designed to incorporate the upside of risk – for example, seeing a potential market disruption as a growth opportunity for a redesigned business model – into a firm’s strategic alternatives.

• In his article, “Determining which CEO candidates will lead growth through innovation,” John Oliver, Academic Consultant at Bournemouth University and an Adviser to the Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology, U.K. Parliament, indicates how the inherent risk in appointing a new CEO can be lessened by scrutinizing a number of potentially significant candidate characteristics – age, education, career experience and tenure – which can indicate an executive’s orientation toward innovation. He points to research that suggests, for example, that “Younger CEOs are generally better at perceiving and understanding emerging technologies and trends and are more willing to take risks and adopt more aggressive R&D investment policies than their older CEO counterparts.”

• “CEOs of companies have a primary responsibility to establish a shared concern with employees for safety,” assert Russell Craig and Joel Amernic in their article “Using ‘CEO-speak’ to prioritize a safety culture.” Craig, Adjunct Professor in the Business School at the University of Canterbury, and Amernic, Professor at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, coauthors of Decoding CEO-speak, believe “CEOs can provide sustained and meaningful leadership on safety through the language they use and their support for risk reduction programs and training.”

• In their article, “Building threat resilience into ecosystem strategy,” IBM Institute for Business Value researchers Jacob Dencik, Anthony Marshall and Gerald Parham warn that large ecosystems have become a central business strategy while too little attention has been paid to the potential for cyber threats. In response to the challenge, “Mature, risk-mitigated ecosystems are starting to resemble a mature supply chain, where some risks are precluded by design, some partners are favored based on established trust criteria and remaining risks are explicitly managed transactionally as part of the partner relationship.”

Good reading!

Robert M. Randall

Editor

Strategy & Leadership