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ABSTRACT
Many challenges face the strategic leader who must deal with both the need for continuity and the need for change. Strategic leadership sets the directions, meaning, purposes, and goals of the organization. A long-term perspective is required along with many other competencies. Examples are provided of successful strategic executives and of why other CEOs fail.
JEL Classification: A13, D21, D23, D73, D74, D78, D81, J33, J53, L21, L22, L26, M12, M13, M14, M51, O32
Keywords: Behavioral model of leadership; Decision making; Successful and unsuccessful CEOs; Boards of directors; Top management; Governance; Strategy; Directive management; Participative management; Ttransformational leadership
I. INTRODUCTION
Chief executive officers and top management set policies for acquiring and integrating resources for the organization. Among their goals are to reduce uncertainty, increase stability, increase resources, and reduce competition. They strive to create favorable public images and opinions of the organization and its products and services. They oversee conformance with government policies, regulations, taxes, and trade. Indirectly, they influence government through personal influence, support of lobbyists, trade associations, and political campaigns. Ideally, top-level business leaders choose markets based on strategic planning and location of their facilities. They manage the management, production and services systems. Their evaluations, coordination, and policies influence the organization's subsystems of finance, capital, and personnel (Day and Lord, 1988). In the nonprofit sector, James Webb, long-term Director of the National Aeronautic and Space Agency exemplified the effective chief administrator of a federal agency. According to Sayles (1979), NASA was superbly managed. In under ten years, the agency went from no knowledge of man in space to an operational space program. It was a tremendous accomplishment in organizational leadership. The strategic thinking and implementation had to occur in the face of many risks, uncertainties, and unknowns.
Strategies are a product of the interaction of the individual leader and the organization's internal and external environment. Systems thinking is required that aims to produce the synergies that are more than the sum of the individual parts of the organization. Complexity is the rule rather than the exception. The complexity is illustrated by two organizations jointly supporting basic research but competing in the same market.
Providing strategic leadership is an important role for the CEO and for many other senior executives (Farkus...