Strategic Leadership

Abstract

Strategic leadership is the theme of this second issue in the Strategic Management Journal’s special issue series. In its nearly 10 year history of publication, the SMJ has had too little opportunity to publish detailed material related to the people and processes at the top of the organization that give life to the constructs and theory underlying the whole of strategic management. Computers allow things like this to be verified, so I checked the titles and summaries for the articles published in the SMJ through Volume 9, and only three citations of the word ‘leadership’ came through that search. And two of these had to do with ‘cost leadership’! Hardly an impressive number for so interesting a concept as leadership. A natural question was why there were so few articles on such an important topic.