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As a high school senior, there was no doubt I wanted to attend college, it was just a matter of where. I applied to only two universities – Oakland University (OU) and MSU. I was not too familiar with MSU, but it had a good reputation; I was much more familiar with Oakland. Although I had obtained an application for the University of Michigan (UM), I decided that the UM application was just too long to complete. And what the heck is a wolverine anyway? I lived in Michigan for most of my life, and I had never spotted this mythical rodent. As a tendency, I always found Michigan students and alumni to be either too arrogant or eccentric for my taste. Also, at that time of my life, I found the atmosphere in Ann Arbor not right in some way, so I applied to only two universities.¹

CEOs and other strategists don't have to be frustrated in their efforts to renew their companies through strategic change. But they do need to pay as close attention to strategy implementation as they do to strategy formation.

A strategic review is an ad hoc examination of a company's strategies and related capital investments, and it is usually performed during a period of transition or hard times. For companies with formal corporate planning systems, the strategic review represents a flexible and effective way to validate business strategies. It is also well suited to joint action by central and business unit planners in multidivisional companies with highly decentralized planning processes.

Today, a growing number of companies are following the lead of their premier competitors and of world‐class companies as a result of insights gained from benchmarking. This process involves identifying valid measures for comparing peformance among peer or other companies, ranking companies against these measures, investigating the practices that are the source of superior performance, and setting performance targets to exceed best‐observed practices.

The companies that find the fastest route to riches will be those that manage all stakeholders effectively.

Intangible assets have grown in size and importance to individual firms and to the economy as a whole. Many have examined and written about ways to value the intangible assets of firms and the overall economy. Professor Baruch Lev of New York University has developed an approach to measure intangibles performance for any company, or division of a company, that uses GAAP financial reporting and that has publicly traded equity. Professor Lev has also established how intangibles performance is linked to stock returns. The collaborative research of the co‐authors has extended this linkage by identifying certain management practices as drivers of intangibles performance. The culmination of this work is a breakthrough – for the first time, specific management practices can be linked to stock returns.

The Great Benchmarking Scam? Time was, in management circles, that the term “benchmarking” would induce none‐too‐disguised yawns in recognition of it “being something to do with computers or job evaluation”. Not today; those yawns have been replaced with the excited management‐blabber of a new fad. You can benchmark anything these days; I encountered recently a guide to benchmarking employee attitudes.

Explores the importance of several regimes of new product development activities using multiple statistical techniques on two different data sets collected in the USA and Canada over 12 years apart. The results were consistent across the statistical methods and across the data sets, but contradict much previous new product research. In particular, it was found that undertaking technical activities proficiently is more important than performing marketing activities proficiently and that performing development stage (including subsequent) activities proficiently is more critical than performing “up‐front” or predevelopment activities proficiently in determining the success or failure of new industrial products.