Do you believe that strategic management is a matter of formulating a plan to then implement it? Do you believe that managing a strategy is about setting key performance indicators to then rigorously check whether these have been achieved? Neither do I.

In my experience, there is a limited role for planning and KPIs. Strategically managing a firm or organization is about recognizing that the only certainty is change. This requires an approach to strategic management that embraces its immediate and relentless nature. That is why my research and teaching is focused on liberating strategic management from the strategic planning straitjacket.

My research is aimed at developing the notion and practice of wayfinding as a more relevant mode of strategic management. Wayfinding recognizes that strategy is an achievement that emerges from ongoing activity by many within but also outside the firm. Being strategic means to question whether and how to participate in such an ongoing process. This is about employee and managers and how they contribute to the strategy process. This is about firms and organizations and how they contribute to generating value-in-use. I do this by looking at how strategy and innovation actually is being realized. As part of this, I have been concentrating on ‘high value manufacturing’ and on how manufacturing increasingly is a matter of multiple participants who collectively propose and realize value propositions.

Harry Sminia is professor of strategic management. Before joining Strathclyde in 2013, I held positions at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and the Vrije Universteit, Amsterdam in The Netherlands and the University of Sheffield in the UK.

To do and to teach strategy, I believe there is nothing so practical as a good theory (to paraphrase Kurt Lewin). Furthermore, he beliefs that learning is the most effective if you have to do what you are being taught. For those reasons he always tries to involve students in activities in which they have to use strategy theories to experience their practicality.

I am happy to supervise PhD students who – like me – are interested in finding out about 'how' questions in the broad area of strategic management. Yet he is particularly interested in projects that are at the crossroads of strategy, innovation, and manufacturing.

• Strategy as wayfinding
• Strategy process
• Realising strategy
• Strategic management capability
• High value manufacturing
• Process research