Why capable firms lose their footing.

I have spent my career on one question: why capable firms lose their footing when the political ground shifts, and what allows others to turn the same turbulence into advantage. BP did not fail to anticipate that Russia carried political risk; everyone anticipated that. It lost more than $20 billion because exit had become unthinkable long before it became unavoidable. The failure was not intelligence. It was response.

I came to strategy as a political scientist. My doctorate is from the European University Institute in Florence, by way of the London School of Economics, and my postdoctoral research project in the mid-1990s examined Europe’s deregulating airline industry, where upstarts like Ryanair were using new rules to take apart old incumbents. That early Ryanair work appeared in Long Range Planning in 1999, and since 2022 I have been the journal’s Co-Editor-in-Chief. In between were two decades of work on business model innovation and what scholars call nonmarket strategy, the configurations and activities through which firms strategically manage their political and social environments.