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Anatomy of a Murder, a beloved, highly influential, seemingly liberal 1959 classic law-film seems to appropriate some of the fading western genre’s features and social functions, intertwining the professional-plot western formula with a hero-lawyer variation on the classic western hero character, America’s 19th century archetypal True Man. In so doing, Anatomy revives the western genre’s honor code, embracing it into the hero-lawyer law-film. Concurrently, it accommodates the development of cinematic imagery of the emerging, professional elite groups, offering the public the notion of the professional super-lawyer, integrating legal professionalism with natural justice. In the course of establishing its Herculean lawyer, the film constitutes its female protagonist as a potential threat, subjecting her to a cinematic judgment of her sexual character and reinforcing the honor-based notion of woman’s sexual-guilt.

Business leaders can add to their bottom line by being more attentive to “soft” organization factors, such as the commitment level of employees, the quality of leaders, and the linkage of both to obtaining results. Such “intangible” factors account for 50 percent of a company’s market value. Results‐based leadership is the key source of increasing this intangible value. The selection and development of leaders in the organization should begin with the question, “What is it we need to deliver for the company?” Next determine the behaviors the leaders need to deliver those results. Too many companies do the reverse. For example, a firm wants leaders who have a vision “so that” the company will be able to innovate products faster than competitors. Or, the business wants leaders who can build teams quickly “so that” the time from concept to commercialization of a product is 20 percent faster in two years. Four attributes of leadership are suggested: setting direction for where the organization is headed; demonstrating personal character; mobilizing individual employee commitment; engendering the organization’s capability (building systems). Linking these attributes to results, there are four steps offered that will help build results‐based leaders: believe that leadership matters; develop a leadership brand; assess leaders and find their gaps; invest in leadership. A four by four matrix tool is offered as an aid to promote the linkage between capabilities and results. Empowerment becomes easy when the four levers (information, competence, authority, and rewards) are taken across the four boundaries of every company (vertical, horizontal, external and global). A succinct example: most firms move authority vertically from top to bottom but fail when they keep information, competence and rewards at the top.

Early paradox research in organization theory contained a remarkable breadth of inspirations from outside disciplines. We wanted to know more about where early scholarship found inspiration to create what has since become paradox theory. To shed light on this, we engaged seminal paradox scholars in conversations: asking about their past experiences drawing from outside disciplines and their views on the future of paradox theory. These conversations surfaced several themes of past and future inspirations: (1) understanding complex phenomena; (2) drawing from related disciplines; (3) combining interdisciplinary insights; and (4) bridging discourses in organization theory. We end the piece with suggestions for future paradox research inspired by these conversations.

Too often leaders of multi‐business groups struggle with how to best add value at this level of management. CEOs and business group leaders can improve the odds of success in these roles, and better retain potential successors, by answering three questions: Is there a clear business case for grouping these businesses? Given a clear business case, what are the most important roles the group executive should play? Given these roles, what are the key skills I should look for in each group executive? Drawing from interviews, existing literature, and their own extensive experience, the authors provide frameworks and perspectives that help top executives answer these questions.

The case opens with Martha Stewart's 2005 release from prison following her conviction for obstructing an insider-trading investigation of her 2001 sale of personal stock. The scandal dealt a crippling blow to the powerful Martha Stewart brand and drove results at her namesake company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSO), deep into the red. But as owner of more than 90 percent of MSO's voting shares, Stewart continued to control the company throughout the scandal.

The company faced significant external challenges, including changing consumer preferences and mounting competition in all of its markets. Ad rates were under pressure as advertisers began fragmenting spending across multiple platforms, including the Internet and social media, where MSO was weak. New competitors were luring readers from MSO's flagship publication, Martha Stewart Living. And in its second biggest business, merchandising, retailing juggernauts such as Walmart and Target were crushing MSO's most important sales channel, Kmart. Internal challenges loomed even larger, with numerous failures of governance while the company attempted a turnaround.

This case can be used to teach either corporate governance or turnarounds.

Students will learn:

• How control of shareholder voting rights by a founding executive can undermine corporate governance

• The importance of independent directors and board committees

• How company bylaws affect corporate governance

• How to recognize and respond to early signs of stagnation

• How to avoid management actions that can make a crisis worse

• How weaknesses in executive leadership can push a company into crisis and foster a culture that actively prevents strategic revitalization

How control of shareholder voting rights by a founding executive can undermine corporate governance

The importance of independent directors and board committees

How company bylaws affect corporate governance

How to recognize and respond to early signs of stagnation

How to avoid management actions that can make a crisis worse

How weaknesses in executive leadership can push a company into crisis and foster a culture that actively prevents strategic revitalization

Although there has been some attention to how notions of entrepreneurship and family intersect in the life of family businesses, analysis of these issues in relation to inter‐generational and organisational emergence in small family firms is underdeveloped. In order to redress this imbalance, it is important to undertake analysis of entrepreneurial issues alongside those of family, ownership, management and inter‐generational emergence. A fourth entrepreneurial axis is added to Gersick's developmental life cycle framework to facilitate this. This is then applied to aid interpretive analysis of two second generation owner‐managers and sons‐in‐law of the original founders of a small manufacturing company in the UK. Working with his younger brother‐in‐law, the two family members are responsible for taking a small steeplejack company into its third generation and a new electrical engineering market. As the younger brother‐in‐law takes on an entrepreneurial role within the company and endeavours to develop new opportunities, the chairman gives an account of the struggles involved in achieving a balance between ownership, management and family tensions. The notion of “interpreneurship” whereby family members are interacting and creating new possibilities for themselves, their lives, their organizations whilst drawing upon past events, happenings, experiences and conversations that have gone before, is also considered.

The purpose of this paper is to use Stewart’s model of role as a lense from which to explore chairperson and CEO role dynamics in addressing strategic paradox and tension.

The paper draws on 29 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with chairpersons and CEOs of UK-listed companies. Interview data are subjected to role analysis using Stewart’s (1982) Demands-Constraints-Choice (DCC) model of role.

Findings indicate that relationship levels of trust, communication and chairperson time enable strategic tensions to be raised and confronted in the relationship reducing defensiveness. Two distinct approaches to handle strategic tensions are found. The CEO-led approach predominates and rests on less flexible role boundaries, requiring the chairperson to proactively identify strategic tensions and perform an advisory/mentoring role. The shared leadership approach, less prevalent, rests on highly flexible role boundaries where the skills and experience of each incumbent become more relevant, enabling the separation of efforts and integration of strategic tensions in the relationship in a “dynamic complementarity of function”.

The paper only applies to the UK context and is limited to contexts where CEO and chairperson roles are separate. The paper draws on individual perceptions of chairperson and CEOs (i.e. not pairs).

The paper provides insights to practicing CEOs and chairperson on two distinct ways of working through strategic paradox and tensions.

The paper adds to the scarce literature at chairperson and CEO roles and strategic paradox and tension.

Over the past five years, McKinsey has been involved with over 800 individual post merger engagements. The perspective gained from post‐merger management (PMM), combined with corporate finance and strategy (CFS) research, has helped the firm improve target selection and evaluation. McKinsey found several patterns of success in their analysis of M&A data. Larger, high‐performing companies making smaller acquisitions of less successful companies do better than average. When companies pursue a balanced buy‐and‐sell approach over time, performance improves. Companies with an integration program – they make a series of acquisitions that seem to be heading towards a particular goal – do well. Companies that undertake formal, post‐transaction learning improve their performance. Acquirers who are relatively strong performers compared to their targets do better than average in the acquisition game. Acquirers tend to do a better job of making estimates of cost‐based synergies than they do of estimating revenue‐based synergies. Some 70 percent of mergers fail to achieve expected revenue synergies. But on the cost side, the experience is considerably better, though they are still overestimated by 20 percent or more in about 35 percent of the cases.

An interview with Thomas A. Stewart, recently appointed editor of the Harvard Business Review and formerly Editorial Director of Business 2.0 and a member of the Board of Editors of Fortune. His latest book is The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty‐first Century Organization (2002). Stewart’s message: Knowledge is the most important factor of production in the modern economy and a key to achieving competitive advantage. Investment in intellectual capital almost invariably provokes further complementary investments, producing a self‐feeding circle of investment and value creation. If you don’t know why you’re doing knowledge management, you shouldn’t be doing it. To apply knowledge management ideas and tools to solve business problems, you have to first identify the business problems. More companies are now operating in real time. In these companies, management can see their companies running almost the way an open‐heart surgeon can see the heart beating. That is going to change the art of management in a lot of ways. One effect will be to increase the visibility of the importance of knowledge and information. The response to 9/11 has made people much more aware of the value of their knowledge and much more aware of how to manage, collect, and protect both that knowledge and the people who create and embody it. As we move forward, I think we will be seeing an explicit recognition that deploying and redeploying people and knowledge leads to the fastest growth.

This exploratory study focuses primarily on the nature and components of the midlife transition and secondarily considers its antecedents and consequences for a group of 36 professional women who were married, had children, and had enduring careers. In‐depth interviews with these women provided the data for our analysis. The results suggest that age, family characteristics, and employment characteristics influence the transition. In addition, the women rebalance and develop new perspectives at midlife. Components of the resulting internal and external recalibration are identified. This recalibration resulted in increased satisfaction and overall well‐being.