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In this chapter, two academics from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan collaborate with the President of their university to present their experiences and ideas about positive strategic leadership. Positive strategic leadership is derived from the juxtaposition of ideas from the growing stream of research on positive organizational scholarship with what is already known from the literature on strategic leadership. The authors embed new views into current theoretical perspectives on strategic leadership to provide an integrative overview and use the president's experiences during the nationally followed Affirmative Action cases as a vehicle for illustrating five themes: (1) A lifetime of experiences shapes who you are, (2) issues commonly choose you before you choose them, (3) begin with a purpose in mind, (4) appreciate divergent views, and (5) be a beacon for the future. Additionally, the authors provide practitioners with some “takeaways” on positive strategic leadership.

It is proposed that the desirable goal of structuring the organization for leadership development has less to do with formal hierarchical structure than with the informal norms and networks that support organizational systems and processes. In this manner, strategic leaders need to think of themselves as social architects in helping to generate the kinds of normative conditions that facilitate leadership development. In particular, priority concerns for leadership development are issues such as what are the culture and climate for learning and development? and how healthy is the interpersonal context in which the shared work of the organization takes place?

In 2001, Carlsberg became the fourth largest brewer in the world – but that world was increasingly competitive. This chapter explores how Carlsberg's top management team translated its vision into a few critical priorities, their must-win battles – and then cascaded these throughout the organization to create the alignment, energy, and motivation to realize its goals. At the core, its approach was creating not only shared priorities intellectually, but also a strong culture of cooperation. Five key factors underpin Carlsberg's significant improvements in market position and financial returns: (1) walking the talk, (2) communicating constantly on many levels, (3) maintaining a solid grip on reality, (4) embedding the agenda in the core processes of the organization, and (5) the personal commitment and ownership of the CEO.

After a decade of continuous success within IQ, a $79.9 billion technology company, Duncan Covington faced one of his greatest career challenges. He was tasked with turning around a procurement organization that was underperforming, had a vacancy rate of 45%, and a tarnished internal reputation. Just five years earlier this same organization had been considered an outstanding contributor to the company and had received numerous awards and accolades. He used leadership discretion to redesign the organization and created six new structures to motivate and lead his staff to success: (1) value creation; (2) improving workgroup productivity; (3) succession planning; (4) long-term value for employees; (5) fee-for-service; and (6) contributing to innovation. By using these structures Covington was able to transform and restore the organization to a high performing and a contributing division within the company.

While there is growing recognition of the role of leaders as managers of meanings, leadership theories have so far focused primarily on the articulation of a positive vision, the framing of organizational issues as opportunities, and emphasizing potential gains and benefits for the organization and its members. However, these positive frames may not be equally valid under all circumstances and with respect to all issues. This chapter concentrates on exploring leadership as management of meanings in times of crisis and recovery, when leaders attempt to stop deterioration, turn the organization around, and lead it to recovery. We label this leadership approach prevention-oriented leadership. On the basis of an analysis of a series of weekly e-mail letters sent by the CEO of a large company to all organizational members over a period of 22 months we suggest that prevention-oriented leaders may use three related ways to manage meanings, namely (1) generating a clear picture of the negative challenge, (2) strengthening the organizational members’ self-efficacy and confidence in the organization's resources available for coping with the crisis, and (3) creating a sense of progress.

Most of the literature on strategic management portrays the strategic leader as a planner, decision formulator, and implementer of structure and processes. Theories of strategic management have not paid much attention to the essence of all leadership roles, namely the role of influencing others, and have not been much informed by leadership theories in this regard. In this chapter, I argue that the existing gap between the field of leadership and the field of strategic management can be bridged by paying closer attention to the fundamentally social and interpretative nature of the strategy formation and implementation, and in particular to the role of strategic leaders as managers of meanings. The chapter presents the idea of leadership as the management of meanings, applies this idea to the role of strategic leaders, offers a set of meanings to focus on when we consider strategic leaders as managers of meanings, discusses the link between meaning making and organizational performance, and attends to some potential dangers involved in viewing leaders as managers of meanings.

This chapter focuses on “healthy-sick” organizations. We define them as those organizations that appear to be healthy to the outside world but are sick at their core. We identify and discuss, in detail, singular attributes of healthy-sick organizations and their path to failure. As senior organizational leaders are responsible for creating and maintaining the set of interactions that creates the healthy-sick phenomenon, our elaboration will necessarily focus on these leader(s). We conclude with a set of recommendations to mitigate the probability of organizations falling into the healthy-sick trap.

This chapter describes an approach to leadership development that focuses on enhancing an organization's capacity for “connected leadership.” The framework is based on the idea that, in the face of complex challenges, three organizational-level leadership tasks must be accomplished: (1) direction must be set not once and for all, but in a way that is recurring and iterative; (2) alignment must be created among aspects of a work flow, among people and groups, and among organizational systems and processes; and (3) commitment must be generated and maintained throughout times of change. We describe four features of our approach and illustrate using examples from an organization in the midst of significant transformation.

We follow Dr. Luc Verburgh through his first two years as CEO of Wellant College. He arrived there in the middle of a major strategic change and his mandate was to implement a change away from a traditional learning model to a new one. His first task was to define, with the executive team, the college's overall vision and strategy. Once that was accomplished, he turned his attention to the task of cascading both the vision and the strategy down throughout the organization and quickly implementing them. He achieved this by focusing on four areas: (1) making sure that the right people were on the team; (2) changing Wellant College's organizational structures and processes to promote communication and to manage performance; (3) communicating clearly and transparently throughout the entire process to all of the stakeholders about the changes taking place and the evolution of the strategy, seeking their views when appropriate; and (4) gradually changing from a top-down approach to one that had clearer guidelines and regulations, as well as allowing, even encouraging, more local ownership.

Sharp Corporation, established in 1912, has always tried to identify unique niches that its competitors do not enter, while at the same time continuing to pursue innovation and knowledge creation in those niches. The liquid crystal display (LCD) business is a typical example of Sharp's strategy and innovation. Sharp developed the first successful LCD product – a pocket calculator with a small black and white LCD in 1973 – and since then the company has released a series of unique products with LCDs, including PDAs and camcorders. In 1998, in the face of increasing competition in the traditional cathode-ray tube (CRT) TV market, Katsuhiko Machida, the company's new president and strategic leader, announced his vision of upgrading all bulky CRT televisions sold in the domestic market to flat screen LCD sets by 2005. This vision was bold, since Sharp was the first producer of color CRT TVs and its business was still profitable at the time. However, Machida as strategic leader, predicted tough price competition in the CRT business in the future and began to mobilize Sharp's employees to gain and sustain competitive advantage in the new market.