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The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework to understand the subject of strategy.

The article weaves together the author's thinking, research and experience in strategy consulting.

Strategy is the relationship between means and objectives. It operates at a system level.

Bad strategy is expensive. A better understanding of the difference between strategy and tactics will clarify objectives, shape innovation, allocate resources and enable competitive advantage.

The paper deals with widespread error and confusion about the nature and function of strategy, with significant implications for decision‐making.

To define the contours of a new marketing attuned to the information age, and to introduce the concept of marketing ecosystems as a new framework for competitive strategy.

This paper draws on five years of research and consulting experience applying general systems theory to strategy design, backed by the author's nearly 20 years field experience in the marketing services industry.

There is a conceptual gap between thinking systems used by marketers to create novelty and demonstrate value, the “ground truth” of a saturated information environment, and the currents shaping major directional change in the world. Marketers adopt management strategies that consistently trail, rather than anticipate, technological change.

Making strategic choices to compete between and within marketing ecosystems – system‐level competition – is now an increasing focus of business strategy. The paper provides new metaphors to frame brand management for system‐level competition, a new orientation to create novelty in marketing, and a new path to solve complex problems of marketing and sales performance.

The paper introduces marketing ecosystems as an enabling concept for transformative thinking about competitive brand strategy. It acts as a counterweight to the dominant view of marketing that says customer targeting is a sustainable business advantage. The paper has value to executives in all industries who seek new ideas and better output from their marketing operations.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

This chapter offers a critical evaluation of the disability scholarship of Michael Oliver, a leading developer of the British social model of disability, and Peter Singer, a philosopher whose utilitarian ethics excludes some persons with intellectual disabilities from full moral status. Through a critique of the simplified accounts of disability employed by these two very different scholars, this chapter explores the ontology and the moral significance of disability. The importance of the ontology of disability in relation to inclusion is also discussed.

The CW’s long-running horror-drama series Supernatural (2005–) has been accused of undoing progressive advances for women made by Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996–2003). While it’s hard to deny the truth in that claim, Supernatural also problematizes conventional gender roles from a very different approach, one that plays with perceptions of masculinity and social class.

Buffy Summers may initially seem to have more in common with Supernatural’s Sam Winchester, a chosen one with special powers who wants a normal life away from the supernatural. However, Buffy shares more in common with Dean Winchester. Embodying popular gendered stereotypes in their introductions, it’s gradually revealed that there is more complexity to each. Both form alliances with Others; both recognize elements of the Other in themselves. Both transgress conventional gender boundaries, complicating the notion of a binary gender system. Both series introduce the seemingly familiar only to alter it into the uncanny. See the little cute blonde virginal cheerleader? She can kick your ass. See the stupid cocky womanizing jock? All he wants is family and a home. This chapter explores the increasingly gender-blended, social-class-crossing behaviours of Supernatural’s Dean Winchester as an heir to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

The death of John F. Kennedy (JFK) was one of the most remarkable facts of the second half of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, it was reflected numerous times in popular culture, including in popular music. In this chapter, I discuss songs published in the 1963–1968 period in which the image of JFK was represented as an idea, a cultural motif or a political myth created, transformed and maintained by artistic means. In song lyrics, a real person (who was a genuinely influential politician) was portrayed as a person who acquired a certain mythical status, stemming from JFK's charismatic features and augmented by his tragic death. Thus, separate from the real political career as the president, JFK serves as a kind of mythological structure used by several artists to generate meanings and mirror cultural iconography present in American culture.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

There has been virtually no explication of poetry-writing pedagogy in historical accounts of Australian distance education during the 1930s. The purpose of this paper is to satisfy this gap in scholarship.

The paper concerns a particular episode in the cultural history of education; an episode upon which print media of the 1930s sheds a distinctive light. The paper therefore draws extensively on 1930s press reports to: contextualise the key educational debates and prime-movers inspiring verse-writing pedagogy in Australian education, particularly distance education, in order to; concentrate specific attention on the creation and popular reception of Brave Young Singers (1938), the first and only anthology of children's poetry written entirely by students of the correspondence classes of Western Australia.

Published under the auspices of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) with funds originating from the Carnegie Corporation, two men in particular proved crucial to the development and culmination of Brave Young Singers. As the end result of a longitudinal study conducted by James Albert Miles with the particular support of Frank Tate, the publication attracted acclaim as a research document promoting ACER's success in educational research investigating the “experiment” of poetry-writing instruction through correspondence schooling.

The paper pays due critical attention to a previously overlooked anthology of Australian children's poetry while simultaneously presenting an original account of the emergence and implementation of verse-writing instruction within the Australian correspondence class curriculum of the 1930s.

In this chapter, we briefly trace the history of the neo-charismatic movement and review Bass and Avolio’s full-range leadership theory (FRLT). We present the FRLT as the flame bearer of the movement, and argue that it should be used as a platform to integrate similar leadership theories. We identify conditions that may moderate the factor structure of the FRLT, and review the validity of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire – the instrument underlying the FRLT. Furthermore, we identify theoretical deficiencies in the FRLT and propose the addition of a broad class of behaviors labeled instrumental leadership, which, we argue, is distinct from transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership. Finally, we discuss the utility of dispositional variables in predicting the emergence of leadership.