Upper echelons: Donald Hambrick on executives and strategy

Executive Overview This is the fourth contribution to the Crosstalk series, a collaboration between The Executive and European Management Journal created to encourage dialogue and exchange of ideas among leading management scholars in North America and Europe. Crosstalk spans the two journals, and the content presented in each journal complements, rather than duplicates, that of the other. In this Crosstalk, Donald Hambrick from the U.S. and Andrew Pettigrew from the U.K. discuss their contributions to the field of strategic leadership, as well as their thoughts on future research needs. Donald C. Hambrick is (he Samuel Bronfman Professor of Democratic Business Enterprise at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. In 2002, he will join the faculty of his doctoral alma mater, Pennsylvania State University, as the Smeal Chair in Management. Dr. Hambrick also has a BS from the University of Colorado and an MBA from Harvard University. An internationally recognized scholar in the field of top management, he is the author of numerous articles, chapters, and books on the topics of strategy formulation, strategy implementation, executive staffing and incentives, and the composition and processes of top-management teams. For most of his career, he has focused on understanding how top executives matter to organizational outcomes–both strategies and performance. Among his works is ‘Top Management Teams: Key to Strategic Success,’ I which won the 1987 award for best article in California Management Review. His recent book. Navigating Change: How CEOs, Top Teams, and Boards Steer Transformation,2 presents leading-edge thinking for executives who are embarking on corporate change initiatives. Another book. Strategic Leadership: Top Executives and Their Effects on Organizations,3 is used extensively by scholars of executive leadership. At Columbia, he teaches courses in strategy, top-management processes, and executive leadership. Highly regarded by students, he has won all three of the business school's major honors for teaching. He is also an active consultant and instructor in corporate executive education programs. Professor Hambrick is an acknowledged leader in the management field, serving as president of the Academy of Management in 1932–33. He also has served on the board of directors of the Strategic Management Society, on the editorial boards of almost all the major scholarly journals in management, and is a fellow of the Academy of Management.