Membership of SMS was a natural steppingstone upon graduating from the doctoral program at the University of Michigan and I attended my first SMS conference in 1989 and have participated in nearly all of them since. I was invited to join the editorial board of the Strategic Management Journal in 1994 and served as an associate editor at SMJ from 2009 until 2018. When the Interest Groups of SMS were first formed in 2005, I was elected to be the leader of the Corporate Strategy and Governance Interest group and served in that role for three years. In 2006, my fellow SMS members elected me to the Board of the Strategic Management Society and I served until 2010. In 2005, I served as co-chair of the first SMS doctoral consortium. In 2012, I became a Strategic Management Society Fellow and was elected to serve as Dean of the SMS fellows from 2018-2020.

When I first joined SMS it was a much smaller academic organization, with a deliberate effort to be international in terms of its membership and where it held its conferences. The early conferences were a conscious blend of academic and business attendees and presenters. This differs considerably from the Academy of Management or other academic organizations. At the time, SMS only published the Strategic Management Journal with Dan Schendel serving as the sole editor. Conferences were much smaller which enabled more exchange between scholars and practitioners. The growth in scholarship devoted to strategic management led to the creation of interest groups as well as an annual conference that now include workshops, as well as doctoral and junior faculty consortiums. These changes brought in more junior scholars and doctoral students into the society. The publications of SMS expanded to include Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal and Global Strategy Journal.

I thoroughly enjoy interacting with the many junior scholars I have had the privilege to collaborate with and feel we both benefit from the exchange of ideas. They are all hard working and ambitious and it is rewarding to see them prosper in their careers. Many are international scholars with whom I have kept in touch with over the years and I relish our ongoing friendships.

It is increasingly more difficult to publish in the top journals such as SMJ as the number of strategy scholars has grown domestically as well as internationally. This makes it ever more important for academic associations to provide support for junior scholars and doctoral students in their academic endeavors. One of the distinctions of SMS from other academic organizations in management has been its decades long ties to the business community. The opportunity to engage with managers is more critical today than ever as turbulent changes in the world have transformed the corporate governance and strategic landscape in which companies operate. Increased investor focus on ESG issues as well as societal expectations have clearly impacted both the strategy and the governance of companies and poses challenges for management and boards in that companies also face activist investors focused on shareholder wealth. SMS has the opportunity to be at the forefront by providing an exchange on these critical issues and thus engaging academic scholars with the pressing issues that face corporations globally.