The lead author of this book, Howard Thomas, accepted the unexpected opportunity in the most recent decade of his career (2009–2018) to be the Dean of the Lee Kong Chian School of Business (LKCSB) and LKCSB Distinguished Professor of Strategic Management at SMU. He has described this as a thoroughly enjoyable and continuing experience (he is currently Professor Emeritus at SMU), which has afforded him the opportunity not only to explore the different cultures and contexts in the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) countries but to also develop a deep understanding of the evolution of Singapore and SMU.

Prior to SMU, Howard Thomas was Dean at Warwick Business School (WBS) in Warwick University, a university that has been described as having an entrepreneurial culture (see Fraguiero and Thomas’ (2011) and Clark’s (1998) description of “The Warwick Way”). He was also previously Dean of the Business School at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Foundation Professor of Strategic Management and Research Dean at the then newly founded Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and a founding faculty member and the first director of the doctoral programme at the London Business School (LBS). He has been an advisory board member at the business schools of Vienna University of Economics and Business (VU), Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS), UIUC Urbana-Champaign, WBS, and University of Birmingham.

It should be noted that WBS, LBS, AGSM, GIBS, and SMU were all relatively new business schools in expanding business school markets in the UK, Australia, Africa, and Singapore. It is because of this varied experience in start-up schools that a strong research interest in understanding how new, innovative business schools become successful was developed.

Apart from the lead author’s experience as a Dean of business schools in Europe, Asia, and North America, he has maintained a record of scholarship in the fields of decision analysis and strategic management. Three of his more influential colleagues in these fields have been Henry Mintzberg (McGill University), Joe Porac (Stern School, New York University), and Andrew Pettigrew (Said Business School, Oxford University). The characteristic that links these three scholars together is their interest in researching strategic decision-making processes from a range of alternative perspectives: Mintzberg, from the perspective of strategic decision-making as an emergent realised process as opposed to a deliberately planned process (Mintzberg, 1978); Porac, from the perspective of strategising as a sense-making, cognitive process; and Pettigrew (1992) from the perspective of the processual analysis of strategy development, which involves attempting to catch strategic “reality in flight” by closely examining strategic processes and outcomes over time. In particular, Mintzberg’s work on tracking strategies has involved studies of industries as diverse as automobiles, supermarkets, and architectural partnerships. Porac’s (2011) studies of the Scottish knitwear industry illustrated clearly the presence of cognitive communities in that industry, which included cognitive “mindsets” and sense-making beliefs about markets and consumer preferences in the industry. Pettigrew’s work has involved tracking strategies in major companies, such as ICI and the National Health Service (NHS), a major public service organisation in the UK.

In all these cases, several basic steps are normally undertaken in examining the strategy-making process. They include data gathering about the chronology of the organisation(s) and its actions, identifying patterns (strategic pathways) in a stream of decisions and actions over defined periods of time (cycles of change), analysing both secondary data and data from interviews with key individuals in each of these time periods, and finally synthesising all sources of evidence to draw conclusions about organisational leadership, strategies, patterns of strategic change, and performance outcomes as the organisation evolves through time.

We draw on these approaches in our examination of SMU’s strategies and performance over the more than 20 years of its development.

It is important at the outset to outline the rationale for the theoretical and analytic frameworks used in the conduct of our research.

This research addresses the relative scarcity of studies of strategic change and leadership in management education that adopt a processual perspective (a notable exception being Fraguiero and Thomas’s (2011) study of strategic leadership in the business school). Crucially, it provides insight into linkages between the leadership and strategic management fields. Many leadership scholars disconnect leadership from its organisational context and focus mainly on “who leaders are” and “what leaders do”, but not on how strategic leadership works as a strategising process embedded within the organisational context, culture, content, processes, and the external environment. Therefore, we propose a broad analytical framework for our research as shown in Figure I.1.

This perspective views strategic leadership as an adaptive and flexible process embedded in an organisational and environmental context, drawing together insights from leadership and strategising frameworks. We therefore regard strategy as the interconnection between contextual factors, (leadership) processes, and (strategy) content. In adopting this viewpoint, we are very close to the theoretical positions advanced by Pettigrew (1985, 1990, 1992, 1997, 2012) and Mintzberg (1978, 1979, 2007) as shown in Table I.1 where we identify and develop potential theoretical lenses for this study. Indeed, a core challenge for theorising strategy has been to account for how macro (or meso) level entities such as organisations or strategies come to be in relation to the processes or practices of leaders, managers, or any number of organisational actors (e.g., Johnson et al., 2007; Whittington, 2006). The challenge to link micro- and macro-organisational elements in strategy research has produced a variety of innovative theoretical approaches under the umbrella of process and practice studies in the strategy literature.¹ This presents a variety of theoretical lenses to choose from, which, in turn, influences our treatment of data and how we conceptualise the strategy of SMU in this study. Table I.1 summarises the theoretical approach taken: First and foremost, we are interested in understanding how strategies and the organisation change over time and how (and why) they have evolved. Secondly, to guide our study we adopt an overarching philosophy of processual analysis in our research (after Pettigrew, 1990). Thirdly, with a guiding philosophy in place, we address choices and debates in three areas: A: What constitutes strategy – adopting a definition directs our research in what to look for empirically, B: What approaches to use for theorising from process data, and C: What unit of analysis to adopt. Our approach establishes strategy as an emerging phenomenon, as described in column A of Table I.1, and then draws on various approaches for theorising, as outlined in column B. As Johnson et al. (2007) note, the strategy process can be theorised from different units of analysis, including organisations and individuals. Thus, column C indicates a final choice about the unit of analysis in our study, which is the adoption of the perspective of the ‘change process school’ and maintaining the organisation level as both unit and level of analysis. This is as opposed to the perspective of the ‘strategy as practice’ school, which focuses on how strategy is constructed through managerial activity rather than how firms change (Whittington, 1996).