Strategic leadership in practice: leading the strategic process in three top business schools

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The previous chapter explained the logic of the processual approach to studying the strategic leadership process. In order to understand the SLP in context, this chapter examines the efforts deployed by three leading European business schools, IMD, INSEAD and LBS, to compete in the international business school market. This analysis also provides a historical account of the events that determined these schools' evolutionary process against the backdrop of the significant developments that changed Europe – and the world at large – in the late twentieth century and early years of the third millennium. IMD, INSEAD and LBS were studied over the period from 1990 to 2004. To explore SLP practices, the study focused on several initiatives launched by all three schools over these fifteen years to address a specific strategic goal: consolidating their standing as top international business schools . The purpose of this study has been to follow some of the initiatives pursued by these schools to accomplish this aim, using them as vehicles to analyse the SLP in context from a political perspective. Their strategies and actions were approached and analysed from a contextual approach, explained in detail in particular in Chapter 3. After identifying the prevailing aspects shaping their external contexts and the key actors interacting in their internal contexts at each stage within the study's time span, our analysis zeroed in on the contextual features that influenced – and were influenced by – each school's strategic agenda building and execution over time.