The next step.

• Author: Porter, Martin
• Position: EDITOR'S NOTE

HERE'S A PIECE of personal career strategic planning that I picked up somewhere along the way: "Remember, there is always a next step." There is such wisdom in those seven simple words that I make a point to pass along this advice to the graduating seniors that I teach at Temple University.

What is true for individual strategic planning is true for corporations as well. Every enterprise should always be looking ahead to its next step. The worry these past couple of years has been that American companies lost some of their risk-taking edge--i.e., their appetite to take a meaningful next step. There has been a sense that Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) hijacked the board agenda. Board meetings that rightfully should have been devoted to resolving strategic conundrums were monopolized by a fixation on compliance with this new law of the land.

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The pushback against SOX that we are starting to see is, I believe, rooted in a notion that it's time to get back to the basics of board work. Directors are advisers. Let them advise. And what better subject to get their advice on than strategic next steps.

Hence our lead story on the board's role in strategy (page 18). The author, Bob Mittelstaedt, has made past appearances in our pages when he was vice dean of the Wharton School and co-founder of its Directors Institute. Now dean of the business school at Arizona State University, he has a new book out that should have been under every director's tree this past Christmas, Will Your Next Mistake Be Fatal? Fresh from analyzing in his book a veritable hall of shame of strategy missteps, he is the right person to point the way on how...