{"title":"Turning Participation into Durable Organizational Capability","authors":"Laure Marty, Dimo Ringov","doi":"10.1177/00081256261484946","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00081256261484946","url":null,"abstract":"Leaders increasingly open strategy processes to employees, yet many participatory initiatives fail to change how work gets done. This study examines how a bounded open-strategy intervention contributes to capability renewal during strategic transitions. Drawing on a three-year case study of a European SaaS scale-up, we identify three mechanisms through which participation becomes consequential: cross-functional triangulation, authorship legitimacy, and distributed translation. Together, these mechanisms explain how participation reshapes coordination beyond the intervention itself and how capability renewal is accomplished in practice through a designed participatory process rather than top-down redesign alone. We translate these findings into RESET, a practical framework for designing open-strategy interventions that build capability rather than symbolic engagement. Discipline strategy (18)","PeriodicalId":9605,"journal":{"name":"California Management Review","volume":"244 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.0,"publicationDate":"2026-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149123072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Josh Morton, Julia Hautz, Violetta Splitter, Arvind Malhotra
{"title":"Bridging Open Strategy Research and Managerial Practice","authors":"Josh Morton, Julia Hautz, Violetta Splitter, Arvind Malhotra","doi":"10.1177/00081256261493164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00081256261493164","url":null,"abstract":"Open strategy has grown from an initial empirical observation of more participatory and transparent strategy making into a thriving stream of research. However, academic insights are rarely translated into concrete managerial guidance. The articles in this special issue of <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">CMR</jats:italic> bridge research on open strategy and managerial practice. They focus on deepening and broadening existing academic debates, while providing managerial guidance. In this introduction, we distill their contributions into a 5P framework—purpose, parameters, people, processing, and proof—offering managers key practical questions for designing and managing open strategy processes.","PeriodicalId":9605,"journal":{"name":"California Management Review","volume":"50 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.0,"publicationDate":"2026-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149123073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alex Reppel, Stefanie Beninger, Henry Robben, Onur Eken
{"title":"Realizing Agentic AI Value:A Systems Approach to Autonomy and Risk","authors":"Alex Reppel, Stefanie Beninger, Henry Robben, Onur Eken","doi":"10.1177/00081256261486300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00081256261486300","url":null,"abstract":"Summary Agentic Artificial Intelligence (Agentic AI) promises to transform organizations, yet many executives remain uncertain about how to capture value while minimizing the risks of these systems. This article’s Agentic AI Approach Matrix helps executives consider the level of autonomy given to such systems of autonomous AI agents, as well as the organizational mindset. Executives should adopt a mindset of systems thinking when approaching Agentic AI. By embracing systems thinking to drive value, executives are wise to execute the 5Es model to establish, explore, evaluate, and enhance Agentic AI while being aware of the emergence of risks, including opacity, misalignment, feedback loops, sovereignty, and costs.","PeriodicalId":9605,"journal":{"name":"California Management Review","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.0,"publicationDate":"2026-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148993726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Managing the Emotional Dynamics of Open Strategy","authors":"Chris Golding, Timo Vuori","doi":"10.1177/00081256261486202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00081256261486202","url":null,"abstract":"Open strategy (OS) increases transparency and actor involvement in strategy making, promising benefits such as wider expertise and heightened commitment. Yet, its adoption and enactment can trigger emotions among the different actors involved that prevent these benefits from materializing. Drawing on action research across eleven OS processes in large and medium-sized European firms, this article identifies emotional challenges spanning adoption, formulation, and implementation. This article introduces the concept of “emotional architecture”—the deliberate design of processes through which top managers anticipate and manage emotional dynamics—and distills five design principles to help top managers successfully implement OS processes.","PeriodicalId":9605,"journal":{"name":"California Management Review","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.0,"publicationDate":"2026-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148979427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kristian Norling, Nataliya Berbyuk Lindström, Anna af Hällström, Aleksandre Asatiani
{"title":"How Strategic Dialogue Enables Inclusive Execution","authors":"Kristian Norling, Nataliya Berbyuk Lindström, Anna af Hällström, Aleksandre Asatiani","doi":"10.1177/00081256261477019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00081256261477019","url":null,"abstract":"Digital strategizing fails if organizations do not address a fundamental tension: inclusion creates buy-in but risks paralysis, while rapid decision-making enables execution but triggers resistance. Current open strategy research acknowledges this tension but provides no operational guidance for managing it. What is needed is a framework that operationalizes how organizations move between opening and closing in strategizing. This article identifies four dialogue forms and four orchestration approaches that enable strategists to balance stakeholder inclusion with strategy execution, rather than relying on intuition.","PeriodicalId":9605,"journal":{"name":"California Management Review","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.0,"publicationDate":"2026-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148810008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making Inclusion Work: Managing Engagement in Open Strategy","authors":"Robin Engelbach","doi":"10.1177/00081256261471909","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00081256261471909","url":null,"abstract":"Open Strategy’s promise of collective intelligence hinges on moving beyond inviting a broader set of actors into strategy-making to enabling and sustaining their engagement over time. This paper introduces the Engagement Matrix, a diagnostic framework that describes four contribution profiles in Open Strategy work, and traces how actors move across profiles as process conditions change. The analysis shows how these changing conditions produce broader and narrower engagement patterns across the process. The article explains how ability, motivation, and opportunity shape these movements and derives four design principles for managers and facilitators seeking to sustain meaningful inclusion throughout the process.","PeriodicalId":9605,"journal":{"name":"California Management Review","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.0,"publicationDate":"2026-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148810009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Principal Workers: Orchestrating AI Agents Improves Productivity","authors":"Teck-Hua Ho, Catherine Yeung","doi":"10.1177/00081256261470827","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00081256261470827","url":null,"abstract":"For the artificial intelligence (AI) economy, we propose a principal worker model where each knowledge worker is both a task architect and an AI agent orchestrator. As task architect, the worker divides each task into subtasks and delegates some to AI agents. As agent orchestrator, the worker optimizes outputs from AI agents and synthesizes all outputs into a coherent deliverable. Workers who augment themselves with AI agents produce more and earn more. To reap productivity gains, organizations must implement policy changes on how they develop workers and incentivize them to use AI effectively.","PeriodicalId":9605,"journal":{"name":"California Management Review","volume":"187 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.0,"publicationDate":"2026-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148768850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Maxime C. Cohen, Eddy Hage-Youssef, Daniel M. McCarthy, D. Daniel Sokol
{"title":"Three Winning AI Strategies","authors":"Maxime C. Cohen, Eddy Hage-Youssef, Daniel M. McCarthy, D. Daniel Sokol","doi":"10.1177/00081256261477028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00081256261477028","url":null,"abstract":"AI competition is widely framed as a winner-take-all race. Mobile consumer data for the AI assistant category from 2023 through 2025 suggests otherwise: three strategies coexist, and all are growing. Scale (ChatGPT), adjacency (Gemini), and premium specialization (Claude) capture value in strategically distinct ways. Major launches reward the launcher without measurably harming rivals. These archetypes are not unique to AI; they recur whenever a disruptive technology opens a market before competition settles. For managers, the most important question is which strategy their distribution, economics, and customer base can sustain.","PeriodicalId":9605,"journal":{"name":"California Management Review","volume":"59 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.0,"publicationDate":"2026-08-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148728708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Overcoming the Ability-Willingness Paradox: How Family Businesses Enable Circular Transformation","authors":"Nicola Blum, Rahel Meili, Sabrina Schell, Tobias Stucki","doi":"10.1177/00081256261464629","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00081256261464629","url":null,"abstract":"Addressing environmental crises requires firms to pursue sustainability transformation rather than incremental change. Drawing on socioemotional wealth theory and the ability-willingness paradox, this article examines how family involvement shapes the transformation of family businesses toward circular business models. Using a mixed-methods design that combines survey data from 1,400 Swiss firms with case studies, we identify control-value alignment as a mechanism through which family businesses overcome willingness constraints and enable circular transformation. The findings challenge prevailing assumptions by showing that family involvement can facilitate transformative sustainability change and offer actionable guidance for leveraging governance, long-term orientation, and collaboration.","PeriodicalId":9605,"journal":{"name":"California Management Review","volume":"328 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.0,"publicationDate":"2026-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148709604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}