Dear SMS Members,
As President of the Strategic Management Society (SMS), it is my pleasure to present this Annual Report and highlight some of the important achievements in 2022 as well as our strategic priorities for the future. After two virtual annual conferences, we finally reunited in-person for the SMS Special Conference in Milan and the SMS 42nd Annual Conference in London (where 1,286 members joined us)! These conferences were a great success, especially considering the continued shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic. I want to thank the Program Chairs, the Conference Track Chairs, Interest Group & Community (IG&C) leaders, program volunteers, and SMS staff for their hard work and dedication.
As many of us have personally experienced, 2022 was a year with great financial challenges. Yet our society’s financials remain strong. The SMS endowment, combined with a stable membership base (which remains around 3,000) and conference registration revenue, allows us to weather environmental uncertainties and volatility while continuing – and even expanding – our services to our members.
Our journals remain a key foundation of SMS. Please join me in welcoming three Co-Editors beginning terms in 2023: Mary Benner at the Strategic Management Journal (SMJ), Yong Li at the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (SEJ), and Grazia Santangelo at the Global Strategy Journal (GSJ). We thank Sendil Ethiraj at SMJ, Gary Dushnitsky at SEJ, and Ram Mudambi at GSJ for their exceptional contributions as Co-Editors.
We also welcome Mahka Moeen as Strategy Research Foundation (SRF) Co-Chair and thank Michael Leiblein for his dedication to this role during his tenure. Our new SRF grant policy which includes up-front disbursements will allow us to focus on collaboration with scholars to celebrate and promote their research. More than US$216,000 was distributed in 2022 to support exceptional scholars and their research efforts.
I want to thank several colleagues on the Board of Directors for their dedication and contributions to the Society. Africa Ariño completed her two-year presidential tenure, while Javier Gimeno completed his six-year rotation in the Executive Committee. Their leadership and dedication played an instrumental role in steering our Society through the turbulent times in recent years. We also appreciate the services of outgoing Directors Julian Birkinshaw, Sharon Matusik, and Heli Wang and welcome new leadership to the Board, including Sekou Bermiss, Samina Karim, and Riitta Katila, as well as Myles Shaver, who will continue his long service to SMS in his role as President-Elect.
Looking forward, I want to highlight a few strategic priorities of our Society. First, we continue to develop better governance structures and policies. This includes initiatives such as adding non-Board members to various committees to improve accessibility, fairness, and transparency, creating Mission & Vision Statements to guide us into the future, and updating the SMS Code of Conduct to reflect current practices. Second, our strategy to engage with practitioners remains a top priority. Based upon extensive engagement with stakeholders, we identified “The Six Big Questions of Strategic Management.” The “Big Six” will serve as a “cornerstone” list of the fundamental issues affecting the strategy field and will be used to organize our activities and promote research to business leaders. SMS also launched the Explorer newsletter to promote practitioner-oriented articles containing content based on the ground-breaking research being published in SMS Journals, and we are grateful for the support of the SMS Media Innovations team in these efforts. Finally, expanding our geographic reach in order to provide a welcoming and inclusive platform for strategy scholars and practitioners from around the world continues to be a third strategic priority for SMS. Special Conferences that support this effort will be announced soon!
It is truly my honor to serve as your President. There are so many opportunities for you to engage in SMS activities. Let’s work together to continue to expand the inclusivity and increase the impact of the Strategic Management Society.
Sincerely,
Yan “Anthea” Zhang
SMS President
2022 SMS Annual Report
