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This longitudinal study seeks to advance the understanding of consultant relationship competencies and interpersonal style in promotions to partner.

The relationship management survey (RMS), 360‐degree competency assessment and FIRO‐B interpersonal style instrument were completed by 382 principals in two global professional service firms (PSFs) as part of their professional development. Client assessments of competencies in the areas of building relationships, trust, and collaboration, and self‐assessed interpersonal style, were used to predict promotion to partner over a five‐year period.

Interpersonal style preferences for expressing inclusion towards others, and wanting openness from others, are linked to clients' perceptions of relationship competencies each of which predicts promotion to partner (multiple R²=0.474).

PSFs need to select and develop people who have interpersonal style preferences that support the relationship competencies essential for their advancement and firm success. Consultants can enhance their promotion potential by building relationships with clients, developing mutual trust, and fostering collaboration – which may require altering their style to be more inclusive of and open with clients.

The behavioral aspects of consultant‐client relationships can be targeted so as to enhance individual development and promotion potential, and to guide PSFs in apprenticing future partners and obtaining more client work.

The purpose of this research is to examine multisource feedback from a stakeholder perspective, arguing that select competency assessments that different rater groups provide are valid predictors of the “partner” potential and advancement of senior professional service professionals (PSPs).

A 360‐degree assessment tool for PSPs, the Relationship Management Survey (RMS), was administered to 391 principals as part of their professional development. Six RMS dimensions (clusters of competencies) were used to predict a principal's high‐potential promise and promotion to partner three to five years later.

The results support hypotheses detailing how different rater groups assess PSPs differently, and how these differences are relevant to PSP promotion to partner. The predictability of becoming partner increased by 50 percent compared to partner‐only assessments through the use of direct report assessments of the principals' leadership and coaching, peer assessments of collaboration, and client assessments of trust.

Professional service firms can improve their succession planning and promotion decisions by including multirater assessments in their decision making process; PSPs can guide their career planning and professional development by attending to the distinct competency interests of different stakeholders.

This article supports a broader use of different rater group assessments in promotion decisions and the career development of professionals. It suggests the need for dialogue and research regarding when different rater assessments in 360‐degree assessment tools are an index of instrument validity.

Management simulations are used in many adult education programmes. Yet, little has been written about how people learn through participation in such simulations. After a description of how management simulations work, we propose four ideas to support the increasingly held belief that it is worthwhile to use management simulations in business education. Because management simulations are able to provide relevant, individualised, and experience‐based learnings for both programme participants and the facilitators, their use in management education is likely to increase several fold by the year 2000.

Thinking and acting strategically have been identified as essential skills for managing organisations in the twenty‐first century. The rapid rate of technological change, the increasingly complex nature of organisations, and the greater number of environmental uncertainties are some of the reasons cited for this need. Research suggests that strategic thinking encompasses six skills that are critical to managerial effectiveness at senior levels in organisations – knowing the business and markets, managing subunit rivalry, finding and overcoming threats, staying on strategy, being an entrepreneurial force, and accommodating adversity. Obstacles to the development of these skills, and work experiences which stretch managers′ capacities for strategic thinking, are discussed.

This paper examines how management promotion decisions are made in a large organisation, drawing upon interview and survey data and the results of a decision‐making simulation completed by managers at three organisational levels. The findings describe the relationship between elements of decision process, such as the number of candidates considered to fill a vacancy, and the types of information available and the decision outcome. Implications of the results are discussed in terms of how individual needs and desires formulated during career planning may be taken into account when making promotion decisions. The paper concludes with recommendations for making promotion decisions.

Starting a business, launching a new product or venture, or becoming an entrepreneur is a goal expressed by many people sometime during their career. Such goals are often among the two or three career alternatives being considered by business students during the exploration stage of their career (e.g. ages 17 to 30). Yet relatively little information is available in the career choice literature about the distinctive aspects of an entrepreneurial career. Because an entrepreneurial career places many unique demands on those who pursue it, it is important to know how entrepreneurs might differ from non‐entrepreneurs and how an entrepreneurial context differs from a mature business context.

In the current stressful recessionary period, the need for highly effective managers who can skillfully direct bet‐the‐company strategic initiatives such as disruptive innovation, restructuring, strategic renewal and mergers greatly increases. It more important than ever to study the succession planning and leadership training of best‐practice firms to learn better ways to develop high potential leaders. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

The paper offers a summary of some of these best practices and provides case examples of successful applications.

The paper finds that employees with high leadership potential need to be systematically identified and tracked by line managers as part of an overall strategic succession planning process. Success in developing the next generation of leaders requires creating a talent management system in which selection, development, performance management, succession and career management are aligned, reviewed and supported by senior management.

Some of the more cost‐ and resource‐efficient practices for implementing a successful early‐stage high‐potential program include: a special learning and development track for the high potentials; rotation of managers across disciplines‐divisions‐geographies; technology‐based learning; action learning; and coaching/mentoring (internal and external) programs.

To ensure that the talent pool supports the company's overall strategy, the abilities of the high potential individuals should be shaped to correspond with the emerging leadership needs of the next decade. The “best firms for leaders” are typically twice as likely to use a variety of developmental techniques for their “best and brightest.”

To identify ways for business managers to reduce consumer complicity with counterfeit products by better aligning their actions with consumer beliefs of complicity.

A mall intercept methodology was used to interview 54 US and 48 Brazilian business managers' understandings of consumer complicity with counterfeit products. A parallel web survey containing the questions in the interviews was used to assess 401 US and 390 Brazilian consumers' perceptions of what is important to them in determining that a product is counterfeit, the reasons why they were willing to acquire counterfeits, and the perceived effectiveness of anti‐counterfeiting actions.

Managers in both countries held beliefs that ran counter to those of the complicit consumer, particularly in the areas of understanding the reasons for consumer complicity and the perceived effectiveness of anti‐counterfeiting actions to reduce that complicity. Several anti‐counterfeiting actions considered to be of little use by managers were reported to be important by consumers regarding their intended complicity.

As the different motivations of consumer complicity with counterfeit products in different country markets become better known, managers can reduce their loss of business to counterfeiters by directly targeting those factors each country's consumers believe affect their complicity.

Comparing manager and consumer views of complicity with counterfeit products and the anti‐counterfeiting actions that can reduce that complicity in two country markets.

Corporate universities, like other lines of business within an enterprise, have customers and other stakeholders whose wants need to be satisfied. They operate in an environment subject to demographic, technological, and political trends that could affect their business. The leaders of corporate universities need to define the business situation they face so as to leverage their university’s strengths, minimize its problems, actively seek out and select opportunities, and protect against threats. To treat a corporate university as a staff function or support activity is likely to lead to the demise of the university. Corporate universities ‐ if they are to persist past a faddish stage of lip service to “learning organizations” ‐ should be managed as lines of business serving the learning needs of internal, and at times external, personnel.

Personal management styles tend to heavily influence strategic decision making. The authors identify six management styles and describe how each style can influence a company's strategic planning.