Editor’s letter

Strategy & Leadership

ISSN: 1087-8572

Article publication date: 3 July 2009

397

Citation

Randall, R.M. (2009), "Editor’s letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 37 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2009.26137daa.001

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2009, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Editor’s letter

Article Type: Editor’s letter From: Strategy & Leadership, Volume 37, Issue 4

It takes a long-term view to fully answer the question, “What does an author get out of publishing an article in Strategy & Leadership?” In the short term, after an issue is published there may be a flurry of interest in an article, colleagues may offer compliments or the article may get mentioned in other publications. Certainly the resulting buzz, along with the attention from peers and potential clients, is one good reason to publish. But there are many other benefits and they sometimes take years to come to fruition.

For example, when authors working on S&L articles ask my advice about book publishing firms, I note that S&L articles are similar in many ways to book chapters and because of this, make good samples to show agents or publishers. When authors have published several S&L articles on a theme I suggest that they take them to a publisher as a package and try to get a contract to write a book on the subject. One author who took my advice is Joseph Calandro, Jr, the Enterprise Risk Manager of a global financial services firm and a Finance Department faculty member of the University of Connecticut, who coincidently has an article in this issue (“Distressed M&A and corporate strategy: lessons from Marvel Entertainment Group’s bankruptcy“). In his book, Applied Value Investing (McGraw-Hill, 2009), Joe thanks the Strategy & Leadership team for our help with many of the articles that became the book’s chapters.

Brian Leavy, a co-author of Strategic Leadership: Governance & Renewal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) also pays this publication a generous compliment by thanking “colleagues on the editorial team of Strategy & Leadership, for all their support, encouragement and intellectual stimulation over the last five years, much of which is reflected in these pages.” Prof. Leavy has two contributions in this issue – an interview with growth-venture expert Rita McGrath and a lengthy review of Discovery-driven Growth (Harvard Business Press, 2009), which she co-authored with Ian MacMillan. Over time he has become a mainstay of this publication.

We discovered another benefit of writing for Strategy & Leadership recently when John Sterling, a partner in the strategic consulting firm of Smock Sterling Strategic Management Consultants received an award from the Association of Strategic Planning. For his submission to ASP’s Richard Goodman Strategic Planning contest, John reworked his S&L article “A non-profit theater’s strategy focuses on experiences” and won this year in the non-profit category.

These three examples illustrate why I consider Strategy & Leadership to be, in essence, a community in which reviewers help authors refine their articles, editors pitch in to improve them, and colleagues share ideas and contacts. I think our readers would be surprised at the many and various long-term benefits that flow to authors who join the community by undertaking to publish an article in S&L.

Good reading.

Robert M. RandallEditor

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