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As uncertainty increases, business strategies need more frequent adjustments which in turn requires leaders who excel at timely external and internal alignment. We describe six challenges such leaders need to master.

The six leadership abilities profiled in this article are based on a conceptual model that was pre-tested with selected executives. Using factor analysis and other standard tests of validity, we refined an assessment questionnaire and identified remedies. It has been taken by some 30,000 managers from diverse companies around the world.

Our main findings are that strategic leadership can be deconstructed into more basic elements and that leaders can learn to better practice its skills, habits and attitudes once they know where they are personally weakest. Various challenges complicate better integration of strategy and leadership in the heat of battle but successful leaders conquer these by honing six essential capabilities. These are the ability to anticipate, challenge, interpret, decide, align and learn. We illustrate each with examples and then provide practical advice for leaders wishing to increase their strategic acumen.

Readers can complete a 12-item assessment online (www.decisionstrat.com).

The skills that comprise strategic leadership in a world of increasing uncertainty should be viewed as a self-reinforcing system. The leadership challenge, which involves practicing six abilities while overcoming barriers to them, allows the best innovators to win the long game while making frequent tactical adjustments along the way in response to surprise and uncertainty.

As market capitalism celebrates its first decade of undisputed hegemony its oldest barometer — the US stock market's Dow Jones Industrial Average — has undergone one of the rare revisions of its constituent companies. In reseating the top table of corporate America it aims to remain representative of the evolving US economy.

The purpose of this paper is to glean leadership lessons of megaproject managers through the life stories of four purposefully selected managers from two contemporary and two landmark megaprojects.

A narrative inquiry approach applying thematic analysis is used to capture lessons learnt from these stories with a focus on leading megaprojects. Narrative analysis has been used in organization studies and this paper is an attempt to use it in project management research.

Common strategies used by all four megaproject managers to be successful include: selecting the right people and building their capability; building trust with stakeholders; dealing with institutional power and politics effectively; and having the courage to innovate. There were also some differences in the approaches used by these managers due the times in which these projects were implemented.

The use of narrative inquiry is new to project management literature. As the life stories were not presented in the same way it was difficult to analyze them in the same manner, and further data had to be collected. This could have been avoided if it were feasible to collect narratives directly from the megaproject managers. This is being planned in future research emerging from this paper.

This study helps megaproject managers to exhibit leadership attributes that would be required to execute such large complex projects that have wide implications for the society, economy and the environment.

Megaprojects are often considered major displacements that cause social and geophysical issues that affect the environment. Lessons learnt from these stories could be useful to avoid such issues. The stories analyzed showed the human side of the megaproject managers toward people related, health and societal issues.

Narrative inquiry is new to project management literature. In the past, project management literature has focused on extracting lessons learnt from historical and classical projects, but lessons from life stories of project managers have not been used for the same purpose.

The purpose of this study was to identify to identify reasons for the lack of protest against dragnet surveillance in the UK. As part of this investigation, a study was carried out to gauge the understanding of “privacy” and “confidentiality” by the well-informed.

To perform a best-case study, the authors identified a group of well-informed participants in terms of security. To gain insights into their privacy-related mental models, they were asked first to define the three core terms and then to identify the scenarios. Then, the participants were provided with privacy-related scenarios and were asked to demonstrate their understanding by classifying the scenarios and identifying violations.

Although the participants were mostly able to identify privacy and confidentiality scenarios, they experienced difficulties in articulating the actual meaning of the terms privacy, confidentiality and security.

There were a limited number of participants, yet the findings are interesting and justify further investigation. The implications, even of this initial study, are significant in that if citizens’ privacy rights are being violated and they did not seem to know how to protest this and if indeed they had the desire to do so.

Had the citizens understood the meaning of privacy, and their ancient right thereto, which is enshrined in law, their response to the Snowden revelations about ongoing wide-scale surveillance might well have been more strident and insistent.

People in the UK, where this study was carried out, do not seem to protest the privacy invasion effected by dragnet surveillance with any verve. The authors identify a number of possible reasons for this from the literature. One possible explanation is that people do not understand privacy. Thus, this study posits that privacy is unusual in that understanding does not seem to align with the ability to articulate the rights to privacy and their disapproval of such widespread surveillance. This seems to make protests unlikely.