Editor’s note

Citation

Healy, N. (2010), "Editor’s note", Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 31 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jbs.2010.28831aaa.001

Editor’s note

Article Type: Editor’s note From: Journal of Business Strategy, Volume 31, Issue 1

In October I attended the Strategic Management Society Annual Conference in Washington, DC. Although I have attended the conference a number of times, this year the gap between academia and the work world seemed particularly obvious. The overwhelming majority of papers and sessions were research-oriented. It was often difficult for a “lay” person to understand even the titles of many presentations. let alone the content. So once again I’m wondering how this research gets funneled into the corporate world.

The knowledge migration occurs, I suspect, in two primary ways. MBAs and other business students who join the corporate world import their knowledge and presumably apply their book-learning to real-life situations. But as time passes, experience tends to supplant reliance on scholarship and research becomes outdated. Consultants may provide the second way knowledge moves from ivied halls to the C-suite. If a company uses a consulting firm, and if the firm is in close contact with leading business school researchers, then the latest ideas may indirectly be applied to business situations.

I spent the major part of my career working at the senior level in leading corporations and financial institutions. I was present at many decision-making sessions about a wide variety of issues and it seemed that executives made decisions based on experience and input from colleagues, not from research.

This leaves us – academics, consultants and business executives – in the same bind we have struggled against for years. I don’t see any progress toward closing the gap between town and gown in the business arena and I’m eager to hear what JBS readers think about this dilemma.

On a more immediate note, we have in this issue of JBS a number of articles that practitioners should find provocative and readable. First on the list is a paper that focuses on a pressing concern: how to retain customers during and after a recession. We are told by various experts that the recession is over, but the unemployment rate and poor retail sales impart a different message. “Jilted? The manager’s little book for keeping customers in a recession” offers some pithy evidence that businesses do not have to see their customer base erode if they take careful strategic measures.

Two of our papers talk explicitly about innovation, which seems to define our era as a preeminent value for organizations. But achieving it in a corporate environment, and continuing to innovate over many years, eludes most companies. Charles McMillan adapts Porter’s Five Forces to a model of organizational innovation and leadership, while Christiane Prange and Bodo Schlegelmilch discuss the propensity of a company to innovate in distinct ways consistent with its “DNA.”

Sooksan Kantabutra and Gayle Avery, in tackling the familiar topic of vision statements, find they are not only essential, but can also influence performance in positive ways.

Effective corporate communications, too, can not only influence performance in profound ways, but at last we have a method to measure its impact. Courtney Barnes and Reid Walker team up to describe how executives can adapt Lean Six Sigma methodology for improving communication processes and measuring them.

We hope you enjoy these feature articles as well as our columnists and look forward to hearing from our readers.

Nanci Healy