Robert B. Carton

The measurement series foreword

Strategic management and entrepreneurship are both relatively new fields of study. Both are, therefore, experiencing the myriad pains associated with ‘growth’, including issues related to the legitimacy and definitions of the fields themselves, as well as to the development of new knowledge regarding the various phenomena that they address. Currently, both fields are healthy and vibrant – a fact substantiated by several indices, including: (i) an increasing number of articles and books being published in both fields; (ii) increasing professional meeting program time being devoted to papers, symposia and workshops addressing the issues of each field; (iii) an increasing number of scholars indicating both fields as the primary focus of their teaching and research; (iv) an increasing number of graduate students seeking PhDs in both fields; and (v) an increasing number of universities offering PhD programs in one or both of these fields. In the 1970s, the field of strategic management was beginning to evolve as an academic discipline from the business policy and planning area, which had existed at most business schools as a ‘capstone’ course for their MBA and executive program curricula. Toward the end of that decade, I helped Dr Dan Schendel, currently the editor of the Strategic Management Journal, to organize a conference at the University of Pittsburgh around the theme ‘Strategic Management: A New View of Business Policy and Planning’. Later, Dan and I published a Proceedings of that Conference under this title. In addition, we co-edited a series of ‘advanced’ strategic management texts, with the help of Richard Feldman of West Publishing Company, which addressed various important issues in this newly emerging field. At that time, one of the major ‘challenges’ facing the fields of both strategic management and entrepreneurship, in the opinion of many of the scholars in them, was the lack of a substantial theoretical base for these fields. As a consequence, most of the research that was done in both fields at that time was of an exploratory nature. The major focus was on trying to describe the phenomenon of interest, and trying to abstract from ‘best

IT leadership and ERP: a challenging day for a new leader

This case is a set of leadership role-plays that address several critical IT issues including understanding (1) differing objectives of critical project stakeholders; (2) concepts of change management and their importance and process; (3) escalation issues of when and how to do it; and (4) issues arising from client/customer communication. The case combines role-plays with traditional case discussion. The scenario is an IT manager of a large university leading an ERP implementation that must satisfy differing stakeholders including academic, administrative, and curriculum leadership. The case highlights problems of objective alignment, execution, and communication.