The Strategic Management Society’s CK Prahalad Award for Scholarly Impact on Practice

In a delightful — and unexpected — turn of events, I’m going to be traveling to London to receive the Strategic Management Society’s CK Prahalad Award for scholarly impact on practice on September 17. These are responses I gave to some written questions which you can also find at their website.

1. How does your interaction with practitioners inform your research and shape your understanding of strategic leadership?

The late Ned Bowman had a great way of talking about how ideas and practice intersect. He said theories could be used to describe, explain, predict and eventually control, phenomena as understanding progressed. His view colors how I think about the work that we do and how it has an impact. Good theories often start with rich, qualitative descriptions. Where better to find this raw material than in interactions with practitioners? As descriptions build up, one can discern patterns which explain what might be going on. As the patterns become more robust and fine-grained, it becomes possible to use them as leading indicators that will suggest what will happen next. And, of course, once a theory is perfected into cause-and-effect understanding, it can be used to…