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To present the highlights of The Association for Strategic Planning's 2004 conference, “Strategy in a Turbulent World”.

S&L Contributing Editor Stan Abraham attended the conference and selected the most interesting presentations for his report.

Highlights include: Dwight Allen, “Globalization at risk,” David La Piana, “Nonprofit organizations,” Peter Bershatsky, “Managing innovation,” and Doug Randall, “Imagine the future.”

These are conference presentations with various research methodologies.

In his presentation, Dwight Allen suggests that great uncertainty exists as to how international or global trade might develop. Faced with such uncertainty, strategists should undertake scenario planning to develop flexible strategies that can be implemented in a variety of futures.

The field of M&A management remains a work in progress. The principles and practices for effective integration are only partly codified and imperfectly understood. Even with respect to the techniques that are known, it's possible to lose something in the translation and jeopardize a deal through misapplication.

Eight examples illustrate how certain formulas for success can be true as far as they go, yet be potentially misleading or even counterproductive.

Companies integrating organizations after an acquisition should avoid overpromising, define in advance how the NewCo is to look and function once integration is complete, resolve political issues early, adjust the integration master plan as the process goes forward, ensure that every segment of the organization is appropriately engaged in the integration effort throughout, focus on revenue preservation rather than revenue enhancement during the early stages, document the baseline against which synergy achievements will be evaluated, ensure that essential tasks are completed even if that means accepting solutions that are “good enough” rather than perfect, and maintain momentum after Day One.

The most sophisticated M&A team may be just one deal away from a major misstep. Executives should resist the temptation to assume their organizations possess the whole truth when it comes to M&A management, and approach each deal with the wary conviction that we all have much to learn.

Many executives base their strategies on the assumption that globalization is here to stay – they bank on a future of open markets, cross‐border capital flows, and international cooperation. However, companies should consider the possibility that what lies ahead are conditions reminiscent of the early decades of the 20th century, with business activities constrained by protectionist walls and international conflict – not globalization, but deglobalization. If the future does bring more international discord and disorder, the commercial impacts could be momentous. But nobody can say for sure which vision of the future will materialize. How can a company move forward given this uncertainty? Strategic flexibility is the answer – an approach to planning that involves defining scenarios on how the marketplace might develop and then adopting strategies that fit all scenarios while making limited investments in assets needed only if specific scenarios emerge. The latter are treated as a portfolio of real options – the investments are increased, held, or abandoned depending on how events unfold. Strategic flexibility is thus valuable to executives facing strategic risks due to globalization’s unclear future.

Microteaching is a teacher training method based on microclasses (groups of four or five students) and microlessons lasting no more than 5–20 min. Since it was first explored in the late 20th century in experiments at Stanford University, microteaching has evolved at the interdisciplinary level. The purpose of this paper is to examine the networks found via an analytical bibliometric study of the scientific output related with microteaching in teacher training, through a study and examination of the Web of Science database.

This research was conducted with the VOSviewer tool for content analysis through data mining and scientific network structure mapping by means of the normalisation technique. This technique is based on the association strength indicator, which is interpreted as a measurement of the similarity of the units of analysis.

Two hundred and nine articles were thus obtained from the Web of Science database. The networks generated and the connections among the various items, co-authorship and co-citation are presented in the results, which clearly indicates that there are significant authors and institutions in the field of microteaching. The largest cluster is made up of institutions such as Australian Catholic University. The most often-cited document is by Rich and Hannafin. Allen (1968), who defines microteaching as a technique based on microclasses and microlessons, is the author most often cited and has the largest number of connections.

This research’s limitations concern either aspects that lie beyond the study’s possibilities or goals that have proved unattainable. The second perspective, which focuses on skill transfer, contains a lower percentage of documents and therefore has a weaker central documentary structure. Lastly, the authors have also had to bear in mind the fact that the scientific output hinges upon a highly specific realm, the appearance and/or liberalisation of digital technologies and access to those technologies in the late 20th century.

This research shows that microteaching is a promising area of research that opens up vast possibilities in higher education teacher training for application in the realm of technologies. This paper could lead to several lines of future research, such as access to and the universal design of learning from the standpoint of different communication and pedagogical models based on microteaching.

David McLelland outlines the way in which micro teaching by CCTV can be of help to the student teacher and his tutor in assessing progress in teaching practice.

All too often in education the “band wagon” has played an important role in the adoption of innovations. An innovation is often dropped into the schools' environment by enthusiastic leaders who have the expectation that anyone can recognize its obvious merits and will adapt his behavior accordingly. Subordinates, however, make their own judgements on how to respond to the innovation and, in varying degrees, elect to accept or subvert its conditions. Within a framework of organizational theory, this study attempts to explain the differing positive/negative responses of distinct groupings of educators toward the adoption of various classifications of innovations. The findings in this study suggest that the educational subsystem or subsystems which, in order to adopt the innovation, are required to make the greatest modifications in their normal procedures of operation will raise the highest level of resistance.

This paper aims to model and estimate how celebrity chief executive officers (CEOs) credibility (i.e. expertise, trustworthiness, attractiveness) is related to their brand image (i.e. functional, sensory/visual). This paper further examines the effects of consumer materialism on both celebrity CEOs’ credibility and the image of their brand.

A total of 260 participants knowledgeable of CEOs and their corresponding brands completed an online questionnaire in a cross-sectional study. The data were analyzed through covariance-based structural equation modeling.

Celebrity CEOs’ expertise and attractiveness are positively related to both functional and sensory/visual images of their brands. Results also demonstrate the positive effect of materialism on both celebrity CEOs’ credibility and brand image.

The research was conducted in one country (France) using a cross-sectional design. Additional studies in other settings or countries should be carried out to establish the generalizability of results and strengthen causality inferences.

CEOs need to understand and manage their key role as celebrities, given the direct influence they may have on consumer brand perceptions and behavior.

This study refines the relationship between celebrity CEOs’ credibility and brand image. It is the first to introduce and validate the effect of consumer materialism on the perception of celebrity CEOs.

Service learning has become an important teaching methodology in many American schools, colleges, and universities. Libraries will thus want to add resources to their collections in this subject area to support faculty and student research. This article aims to briefly define the concept of service learning and to describe selected resources in the area.

The annotated bibliography is divided into three sections: organizations and their web sites, Periodicals, and Books.

Service learning, once an experimental teaching and learning approach, has become well established as a pedagogy. In designing a successful service learning experience, teachers and faculty must identify real community needs, must structure the experience in such a way that students can grow and learn from it and, on completion of the experience, must assess its outcomes.

This paper synthesizes the literature on service learning and provides a guide for librarians who want to add materials in this area to their collection.

Beginning in the late 1940s, classical Public Administration was challenged by the works of Herbert Simon and the movement he started, logical positivism. Although only writing in the field for a few years, Simon shifted the locus and focus of the field so dramatically, for a time it almost disappeared from view. This article examines Simonʼns legacy, first by exploring its philosophical antecedents and its later epistemological progeny. The article concludes with an assessment of how the field of Public Administration responded to Simonʼns challenge in the late twentieth century and now, early in the twenty first century.