The SMS 44th Annual Conference was held on October 19-22. 1,282 conference registrants travelled to İstanbul, Türkiye—the furthest east and closest to Asia that any Annual Conference has been in SMS history.
Attendees experienced a taste of the city’s deep historical roots of multiple civilizations across millennia, which set the stage for the theme of “Strategic Management of Fault Lines, Contradictions, and Divergences”. Developed by the Annual Conference’s first all-female Program Co-Chairs— Asli Musaoglu Arikan, Şuhnaz Yilmaz Özbağci, and Nilhan Onal Gökçetekin— the call was answered by a record-high 1,558 proposal submissions. The conference Competitive Program featured 119 Paper, 51 Common Ground, and 16 Parallel Panel sessions. Additionally, the SMS Interest Groups & Communities hosted 52 Workshops and IG&C panel sessions.
There were five Plenary Sessions featuring speakers from academic, business, and consulting backgrounds that further explored the fault lines, contradictions, and divergences among strategic management paradigms in scholarship and practice. The Plenary program included a panel on “Can Fairness connect the dots from individuals to firms to nations to the multipolar world order?”; an academic-practitioner discussion on Corporate Purpose featuring the President of Strategy & Business Development for Sabanci Holding; a scholarly debate on “ESG 2.0”; a panel on AI and Competitive Advantage featuring economist Cristina Caffarra, CEO Halil Kulluk, and BCG Managing Director and Sr. Partner Martin Reeves; and a debate on geopolitics from a corporate perspective from a panel of Turkish business leaders.
The conference featured four evening receptions with the Welcome Reception on Saturday night, Socials hosted by the SMS IG&Cs and sponsored by the University of Bath held on Sunday evening, the Monday Night Event taking attendees offsite to Divan Kuruçeşme— a stunning historic venue along the Bosphorus— and a closing reception on Tuesday after conference sessions ended. Several hosted networking luncheons were held during the conference lunch hour. These included the 6th Annual Women’s Networking event, the New Members/First-time Attendees meet-and-greet, the “Meet the Fellows” networking lunch, and the PhD Student Circle LIVE lunch discussion tables. This year, the IG&Cs came together to host several exciting, large-scale activities outside of the conference schedule, including an evening cruise on the Bosphorus and 4-course Turkish ocakbaşı (grill) dinner at a traditional restaurant.
Awards and Honors recipients were announced and celebrated throughout the conference. Attendees toasted the SMS Award and journal prize winners who were honored in a short ceremony that kicked off the Welcome Reception. The Conference Paper Prizes were announced, and awardees presented with certificates, by the Conference Program Chairs during the first plenary session on Sunday afternoon.
