We welcome the chance to continue the dialogue with our colleagues in strategy. Although we think of ourselves primarily as organization theorists, we have at least passing familiarity with the field of strategic management and what it teaches. We share the concerns of Bansal and friends about the potentially malign effects of the way strategy has been taught for the past few decades. Business is by far the most popular college major in America, and if 400,000 students each year are heading off to corporate jobs believing that the whole point of business is to create shareholder value by whatever means necessary, that cannot be a good thing. 

Our main argument in the counterpoint was that the “strategy paradigm” (think Five Forces plus Resource-Based View) incubated within American business schools at a time when shareholder primacy was coming to hold sway, and this fatally imprints the field. Strategy is all about finding sources of sustainable competitive advantage (which might include tactics the current FTC regards as “unfair methods of competition”), with success measured by creating shareholder value. To abandon this mandate would fundamentally change the field’s reason for being and the source of its appeal to those who love it. Strategic management is like the field of sports medicine – it aims to uncover and share the sources of superior performance, not to preach about winning good sportsmanship medals. 

We further argued that (1) organization theory already does what Bansal et al sought for strategy; (2) fundamental change in a field may be impossible; (3) firms are largely evaporating due to technological changes that may make the field of strategy irrelevant; and (4) business scholars collectively need to adopt a goal of decarbonizing business. 

Rather than re-litigating our case, we wanted to share three insights we gained from this dialogue. 

Strategy contains multitudes 

Discussion of the field of strategy imagines it as a singular entity, as if strategy scholars are engaged in a common enterprise. But we discovered in writing our piece just how diverse a field like strategic management can be. In particular, North America (particularly the USA) is an outlier. 

When we submitted our initial draft, our editor (Christopher Wickert) found our portrayal of the strategy paradigm to be unrecognizable, and described how his teaching and his students were all fully engaged with concerns about sustainability. But he teaches in Europe, and we are in the US. We realized that what counts as “strategy,” and what gets taught in core courses, looks very different in the US and Europe (the places we know best). To exaggerate only slightly, the lobby of every European b-school is festooned with the bright colors and logos of the UN SDGs, and the featured speakers include executives boasting of their company’s progress toward achieving those goals. 

A recent visit to EMLyon revealed that the school had hired a PhD climate scientist to develop its required curriculum to ensure that every student was well-versed in the science and policy around climate change. Students were learning the basic physics of climate, as well as being trained in the relevant regulatory frameworks and pathways to change. Meanwhile, in the US: crickets. Or, at least there WERE crickets until the professionals who care for the b-school’s lawn killed them off with toxic chemicals. 

So: the field of strategy is highly varied, both in what it studies and what it teaches, and it seems the US is the oddball with its consensus around shareholder primacy and its willful ignorance of sustainability. 

What we teach is more important than what we publish 

As academics we imagine that the nights and weekends we spend agonizing over our research, finding just the right framing to appease Reviewer 2, are the most important thing we do. Our publications are our beautiful children, and in pain shall we bring forth these children.  

But while Reviewer 2 might be intrigued by our identification strategy, no one in the real-world cares. Our real-world impact comes almost entirely from what we teach those 400,000 graduates heading off to apply what they learned in strategy and finance and marketing.  

SMJ could turn into the Journal of Decarbonization, but until we change what we teach, it will have minimal impact. Put more optimistically: if we DO change what we teach to emphasize methods of decarbonization, we can have an almost immediate positive impact on the world. 

We don’t have much time 

Last, the clock is ticking. As the post by Bansal et al points out, we are halfway through the countdown to the SDG deadline of 2030, and we are not even close to achieving any of the 17 goals. Every month sees new records broken when it comes to climate, from CO2 parts per million in the atmosphere to ocean temperatures to days with triple-digit temperatures. 

We should, for the future of humanity as well as for the continuing relevancy of business schools, transform what we teach as soon as possible. Our view is that items from the organizational theory toolkit should play a part of that much needed transformation.  We recognize that the historic strength of business school curricula has been grounded in an interdisciplinary “a la carte” approach, drawing from the strongest parts of the scholarship of the various management disciplines. That said, our current predicament does not afford us the time to allow any of these disciplines to undergo foundational retrofitting to meet the current moment. Turning (American?) strategy into organizational theory was neither our goal, nor timewise would it be practical. Instead, we advocate that we focus on the areas of scholarship, such as Organization Theory, that have fewer base principles that potentially stand in opposition to climate aims. 

Europe (where Organization Theory coincidentally has a foothold?) is far ahead and provides strong examples. If we want to avoid the worst paths forward, we need to equip the current generation of students with the knowledge and tools to decarbonize business when they leave our classrooms for the real world. If we embrace this mission with the discplinary tools we have in hand, and not the ones we wish existed, we have a chance.