07-02-2025
Jeff Reuer (BSM ’90, PhD ’97) the Blake Family Endowed Chair in Strategic Management and Governance at the Daniels School of Business, and Purdue alum Michael Leiblein (PhD ’96), Professor of Strategy at Ohio State University, are working to bring the voice of practice to the research agenda in strategic management.
A few years ago they created a journal, the Strategic Management Review. The SMR publishes thought-provoking essays on strategy and what makes this field distinctive from disciplines like psychology or economics and other fields in the business school like organizational behavior or marketing. In part, this uniqueness is promoted by featuring “Perspective from Practice” articles written by executives and consultants on the pressing strategy challenges that would benefit from serious academic research. The SMR bridges practice and research by providing a new forum called the Business Practice Advisory Board, chaired by Saikat Chaudhuri (UC Berkeley), which helps academics “learn from practice” when doing their research.
Another important feedback loop is provided by the regular conferences they are convening that bring practitioners and strategy professors into discussions on the future of the field. One of the SMR’s early, global launch events was a conference at Columbia Business School involving James Gorman, the CEO of Morgan Stanley, who provided unique perspectives on strategy and its value during his career.
Most recently, the SMR has teamed up with Martin Reeves, Ulrich Pidun, and their colleagues at Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) think tank — the Henderson Institute — to design and carry out the global strategy survey for this year. The survey was administered to Chief Strategy Officers (CSOs) worldwide to identify the “untamed issues in strategy,” or the perennial or emerging issues for which executives and their advisors believe they do not have ready tools or approaches. Here is where strategy research would be particularly valuable in the future.
Based on this work, BCG hosted a mini-conference in San Francisco that brought together roughly 50 executives, consultants and academics to discuss the key findings and make plans for how to carry forward the insights. A fireside chat featuring Kausik Rajgopal, the CSO of PayPal, identified some of the key opportunities and challenges facing strategists with changes in the technology and business landscape. The gathering followed a similar 2023 BCG-SMR event in New York City with Don Allan, the CEO of Stanley Black & Decker.
The emerging findings from the CSO survey suggest that the untamed issues of strategy cluster into four main categories:
Each of these untamed issues have points of connection to the canonical problems in strategic management and will be discussed and refined at future international conferences and in articles with BCG colleagues.
“These findings and engagements are not only very useful in catalyzing and integrating research in strategy, but in prioritizing all of our activities at the journal,” Reuer says. “They also are helpful in emphasizing issues discussed in the classroom as we develop future leaders with business acumen and technical skills.”
Leiblein notes, “It can be easy for academics to become insular in talking to other academics in a self-referential way within the academic literature. Much like engineering, strategic management is an applied field, and this work by the SMR helps strategy remain distinctive and relevant to solving complex, real-world problems.”
