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This chapter explores Taylor Swift’s leadership in music and business. Highlighting her use of leader–member exchange (LMX) and servant leadership (Dansereau et al., 1975), Swift creates a deep connection with her fans. This chapter demonstrates how Swift empowers her fans through open communication, mutual respect, and shared goals. By fostering high-quality relationships and embodying servant leadership traits such as empathy and stewardship, Swift inspires loyalty and trust. Her high level of engagement with her followers turns her influence into a powerful tool for advocating her values and making impactful decisions.

This chapter examines Taylor Swift’s exceptional team-building and sustaining efforts that enhance her brand. Using social capital and Hackman’s team effectiveness model (Hackman, 1987, 2002, 2009), the chapter delves into how Swift surrounds herself with talented professionals and forms strategic relationships with emerging musicians. These connections foster trust, reciprocity, and collaborative success. By aligning her team with shared goals and maintaining strong interpersonal relationships, Swift exemplifies effective leadership in the music industry. This chapter provides insights into building and managing high-performing teams through unity and shared purpose.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that financial economics must be understood as management thought. Key financial economic theories advocate a specific view of management and organizations, namely, the maximization of shareholder value (wealth).

This study’s methodology is a narrative history of three financial economic theories and their connection to the organizational purpose of maximizing shareholder value. The three theories are Fisher’s capital-income theory, Ronald Coase’s view of firms underlying transaction cost economics and agency theory.

These three financial theories build the same theory, namely, Fisher’s capital-income theory. This theory claims that future monetary flows (wealth) paid to shareholders discounted by a compound rate can explain markets, firms’ prices and even capitalism. Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller relaunched this theory. Coase’s view of firms addresses a difficulty in capital-income theory: if markets are perfect, why is there a need for firms to partially organize production outside the market system? Coase’s answer is because of the costs of using the market price mechanism in the allocation of resources, which reduce the forecasts of future economic benefits. Otherwise, the market would be applied to allocate resources. This view was later developed into transaction cost economics by Oliver Williamson and other scholars. The agency theory from Michael Jensen and William Meckling is just an application of capital-income theory, where firms exist to increase shareholders’ wealth, and managers should receive large salaries and bonuses to ensure this. Agency costs are a type of transaction cost economics that explains the existence of firms.

Future research can explore the relevance of financial economic theories for management thought and practice. This study was developed exclusively from document (archival) evidence.

A better understanding of this source of management thought may be helpful for developing new management theories.

This study demonstrates that financial economic theories contain important elements of management thought, although they are often classified as unrelated to management theory. It provides a narrative history of financial economic theories related to shareholder value constructs.

The purpose of this study is to revisit the conventional wisdom about a key contribution [i.e. strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats (SWOT) analysis] in the field of strategic management. The societal context and the role of academics, consultants and executives is taken into account in the emergence of SWOT analysis during the 1960–1980 period as a pivotal development within the broader context of the satisfactory, opportunities, faults, threats (SOFT) approach. The authors report on both the content and the approach, so that other scholars seeking to invigorate indigenous theories and/or underreported strategy practices will thrive.

Applying a historiographic approach, the authors introduce an evidence-based methodology for interpreting historical sources. This methodology incorporates source criticism, triangulation and hermeneutical interpretation, drawing upon insights from robust evidence through three iterative stages.

The underreporting of the SOFT approach/SWOT analysis can be attributed to several factors, including strategy tools being integrated into planning frameworks rather than being published as standalone materials; restricted circulation of crucial long-range planning service/theory and practice of planning reports due to copyright limitations; restricted access to the Stanford Research Institute Planning Library in California; and the enduring popularity of SOFT and SWOT variations, driven in part by their memorable acronyms.

In the spirit of a renaissance in strategic planning research, the authors unveil novel theoretical and social connections in the emergence of SWOT analysis by combining evidence from both theory and practice and delving into previously unexplored areas.

Caution is advised for scholars who examine the discrete time frame of 1960–1980 through mere bibliometric techniques. This study underscores the risks associated with gathering incomplete and/or inaccurate data, emphasizing the importance of triangulating evidence beyond scholarly databases. The paradigm shift of strategic management research due to the advent of large language models poses new challenges and the risk of conserving and perpetuating academic urban legends, myths and lies if training data is not adequately curated.