ANALYSIS, DECISION MAKING, AND IMPLEMENTATION

Since decision-making quality is the key to effective strategy formulation and implementation,
there are increasing calls for strategic management education to place greater emphasis on what
students are being taught about the "how" of strategic management. This leads to a number of
important discussion questions:

 Are there ways in which decision-making styles can be integrated with popular strategy tools
including Porter's five forces and value chain analyses, SWOT (strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities, threats) and VRIO (value, rarity, imitability, organization) frameworks, portfolio
matrices, and strategy clocks, among others?
 Students today are criticized for their inability to handle the ambiguity of high rates of change
facing many industries. How can strategy educators prepare students to think critically and
creatively while taking into account multiple perspectives and cultures?
 How can strategic management students develop an ability to cope with paradoxes and
ambiguity, given the complexity and contradiction now implicit in strategy making (Schneider
& Lieb, 2004).
 Strategic management courses are dominated by the scientific paradigm (Bennis & O'Toole,
2005; Pfeffer & Fong, 2002). As a result, business schools produce plenty of "technocrats" and
"craftsman" but few "artists" (Maranville, 2011). How can strategy courses integrate the artistic
paradigm?
 How can strategic management courses be designed to fully integrate analysis and
implementation, and what are the roles of non-academic tutors in achieving this?

ADDITIONAL TOPICS

There are several additional areas in which we welcome submissions that advance strategic
management teaching and education

 While the primary focus of the special issue is on teaching strategy in the academic
environment, we also seek to examine approaches to strategy education and training that are
practiced by other profit and nonprofit organizations.

 We also welcome papers devoted to innovation in strategic management education. For
example, such papers might explore combining field experiments with class discussions, or
integrating diverse media in the strategy courses.

 We also echo the call of others to determine how alternative modes of learning beyond the
teacher-student exchange, such as peer review and peer-to-peer exchange, as well as the
development of specialized student expertise, can advance students' understanding of the
complexity of strategic decision making (Mahoney & McGahan, 2007).
References

Jarzabkowski P., M. Giulietti, B Oliveira & N. Amoo (2013), 'We don't need no education'. Or do we: Management
education and alumni adoption of strategy tools', Journal of Management Inquiry, 22(1), 452-472.

Jarzabkowski, P., Spee, A. P. (2009), 'Strategy as practice: A review and future directions for the
field', International Journal of Management Reviews, 11(1), 69-95.