At one time, top managers were front and center in the frameworks of the strategy field. The Harvard model (Learned et al., 1961; Andrews, 1971), which served as principal guide for policy thinkers in the sixties and early seventies, emphasized the personal role of senior executives in shaping their firms. This view was not new. Earlier theoretical work by Barnard (1938) and Selznick (1957), for example, had established a rationale for including top managers in analytic investigations of contemporary organizations. However, as of the early seventies, this theme was essentially lost. Top managers became noticeably absent from writings on strategy, somehow passed over in favor of more technoeconomic factors such as product life cycles, market share, experience curves, portfolio matrices, and industry analysis. Consulting firms all sought their own concise, analytic, quantifiable schemes. Strategy researchers struggled to demonstrate that their domain was as 'hard' as any other. Corporations came to think of strategic management as the annual production of glossy three-ring binders and slide shows, rather than the development and cultivation of strategic thinkers. Now, after almost two decades of relative neglect, the people at the helms of organizations are once again becoming part of the theoretical formulations of strategy and organization researchers (e.g., Kotter, 1982; Hambrick and Mason, 1984; Gupta and Govindarajan, 1984; Miller and Droge, 1986; Gabarro, 1987). The press and politicians have put forth a cry