Guest Editorial: The Lasting Impact and Intellectual Legacy of H. Igor Ansoff, the Father of Strategic Management Richard W. Puyt, Peter H. Antoniou Strategic Change, 2026 This editorial introduces a special issue of Strategic Change devoted to the intellectual legacy of Professor H. Igor Ansoff (1918–2002). The issue brings together historical, empirical, and conceptual contributions that reassess Ansoff's role in the emergence of strategic management and examine the continuing relevance of his ideas for contemporary strategic challenges. Post–World War II, the US Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, and Congress renewed antitrust enforcement against large multinationals and conglomerates. These efforts extended an earlier challenge to the economic and political power of big corporations, often described as the war on bigness (Fligstein 1990; Wu 2018). Large firms were increasingly portrayed as entrenched and privileged, creating pressure for new managerial ideas that could justify scale, growth, and diversification. This pressure helped give rise to long-range planning as a distinct field of inquiry and practice. Lockheed Aircraft Corporation served as an early field laboratory. Robert Franklin Stewart led a small team of experts from the military and government to build a master plan for the firm. Between 1952 and 1957 they produced three generations of the Lockheed Master Plan (Stewart and Lipp 1963). After the launch of LMP II in 1955, Stewart started to work on a unified body of knowledge and skills for corporate planning. In 1957, H. Igor Ansoff, a project manager from RAND, was hired to work on external diversification. Parallel efforts emerged at the Stanford Research Institute, where the Long Range Planning Service (LRPS) institutionalized planning knowledge across major corporations. Charter members included Ford Motor Company, General Electric Company, International Business Machines, Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, and Shell Chemical Company. Ansoff was already embedded in this network, working closely with SRI staff while still at Lockheed. This positioned him at the center of an emerging community that translated planning practice into a shared managerial language. The guest editors of this special issue (2025) interviewed Professor Henry Mintzberg on his recollections about H. Igor Ansoff, reflecting on four key encounters throughout their professional lives (Puyt and Antoniou 2025). Mintzberg speaks of Ansoff with sustained admiration and reflects on the personal, institutional, and theoretical intersections that shaped their careers. Readers will learn that the so-called “Mintzberg-Ansoff debate” probably never will be resolved, even though some have tried (Foss et al. 2022; Moussetis 2011). Mintzberg's conceptual framework: 10 schools of thought on strategy formation (Mintzberg 1990; Mintzberg et al. 1998) can be read as an attempt to construct an overarching theory of strategic management. He noted that he initially wanted to generalize Ansoff's book as the basis of his PhD research. Ansoff adopted a different orientation. He stressed historical accuracy (Ansoff 1991) and the empirical validation of strategic concepts in practice (Ansoff et al. 1993; Ansoff and Sullivan 1993). Kieser captures this divide succinctly: “Sociologists, and among them sociologists of organization, favor grand theories and do not want to bother too much about historical details that discomfort these theories, while historians fundamentally distrust grand theories” (Kieser 1994, 612). This tension also clarifies why Mintzberg brought up the Honda (A) case from Harvard in the interview. The case served to refine and align competing theories within his conceptual framework (Mintzberg 1994; Mintzberg and Lampel 1999). The Ansoff Archive (Puyt et al. 2024) collects artifacts and previously unknown publications from around the world. Finn Birger Lie, the custodian of the private Theory and Practice of Planning (TAPP) archive, shares a historical LRPS report by Ansoff and Stewart (1967) to commemorate this special issue. The report marks an early moment in the debate on the future of corporate planning. In his paper, Lie (2025) surfaces archival material to trace this microhistory in strategic management. He shows how the holistic school of strategic management took shape and how Ansoff's thinking was shaped by working within a small network of influential thinkers. Ansoff (1965) is still considered the cornerstone of Ansoff's legacy. Zupic et al. (2025) provide the first systematic, data-driven assessment of its influence, combining topic modeling, citation context analysis, and historiography. Their study maps how Ansoff's concepts diffused through the field, which ideas endured, and which remained underdeveloped. The paper clarifies Ansoff's lasting impact and identifies gaps that invite renewed empirical work. Ansoff's Strategic Success Hypothesis or Paradigm (SSH) anchors this special issue. Vracheva and Moussetis (2025) position SSH as a diagnostic framework linking strategic behavior, capabilities, and environmental turbulence. Unlike many contemporary tools that address these elements in isolation, SSH offers an integrated logic for strategic alignment under high uncertainty. Its strength lies in diagnosis rather than execution, making it complementary to agility and dynamic capability approaches. In a similar vein, Hristova (2025) tests SSH empirically using two waves of firm-level data from Bulgaria. The results are consistent across time. Strategic planning is more widely used and is associated with stronger performance, even after controlling for contextual factors. Alignment between strategy, capability, and environmental conditions predicts outcomes in both periods. The findings reinforce Ansoff's core logic and demonstrate its continued empirical validity. Antoniou and Park (2025) revisit Ansoff's diagnostic tools in contemporary volatile environments. Focusing on environmental turbulence, strategic issue management, and growth vectors, they show how Ansoff's instruments support disciplined adaptation in both private and public organizations. While some assumptions limit their direct application in small or loosely structured firms, the authors demonstrate that Ansoff's structured approach continues to be practically useful when applied with contextual judgment. Ansoff came from a great line passing through Machiavelli and Sun Tzu (The Economist 2008). In their systematic literature review, Hortega et al. (2025) examine how Ansoff's work evolved within the literature. Reviewing 116 publications, they show a shift from theory building toward pedagogy and applied case work. The Ansoff Matrix remains widely used, yet most studies are conceptual rather than empirical. The authors argue that Ansoff's frameworks endure less as strict prescriptions and more as stable cognitive scaffolding for strategic reasoning. Park and Antoniou (2025) extend Ansoff's architecture into a meta-strategic framework suited to platform-based and ecosystem-driven competition. They incorporate industry architecture, platform dynamics, and distributed capabilities to show how strategic advantage increasingly depends on structural positions within networks. The framework offers a basis for strategy design under conditions of radical uncertainty. While Ansoff is considered to be the father of strategic management, younger generations don't seem to recognize his name. Madsen (2025) addresses Ansoff's declining visibility among younger scholars. Using an institutional perspective, the paper explains this shift through changes in rhetoric, pedagogy, and epistemic norms rather than through weaknesses in Ansoff's ideas. The analysis shows how strategic concepts rise, stabilize, and persist in reduced form, highlighting the field's selective memory. Finally, Puyt (2025) reconstructs Ansoff's complete body of work by cross-referencing existing bibliographies with newly uncovered archival material. Much of this work circulated outside journals or lacked proper attribution. By restoring these sources, the paper shows that Ansoff's contribution is broader and more influential than the established record suggests. The aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that governments rely more than ever on big food, big pharma, and big tech to drive and deliver innovations addressing societal challenges. This reliance carries costs (Bonotti and Zech 2021; Cutler and Summers 2020; Fairbairn and Reisman 2024; Liedtke and Associated Press 2024) and shapes daily political tradeoffs. Its effects extend beyond economic and political power and reach into contemporary issues such as election interference, information manipulation by large tech firms, and commercial pressures on free speech (Fukuyama et al. 2021; Lamoreaux 2019; Menon 2024). The papers in this special issue show why Ansoff's ideas still matter. They do not solve all the structural problems in the field of strategic management, but they open the door for realistic, evidence-driven research. The agenda below follows from the contributions and aligns with current scholarship. The early corporate-planning pioneers developed and tested tools in practice. Strategic management later shifted toward theory building to gain academic legitimacy (Bower 1982; Hambrick 2007; Hambrick and Chen 2008) and lost much of its applied discipline (Drnevich et al. 2020). As a consequence, many modern strategy frameworks remain untested. Some constructs survive through citation rather than independent validation or historical context (Bergh et al. 2017; Hambrick 2004; Puyt et al. 2025). The papers by Vracheva and Moussetis, Hristova, and Antoniou and Park show a path forward: start with an applied problem, run the analysis, compare outcomes, and refine the theory. The 20th-century antitrust movement that produced long-range planning lost momentum. The Chicago School discouraged public spending on limiting corporate concentration (Bork 1978; Friedman 1962). Monopolies and oligopolies were celebrated as market success as long as prices stayed low for consumers. US policy effectively ended the war on bigness. Today, multinationals operate like quasi-states, leveraging diplomatic strategies, economic influence, and political lobbying to shape global policies and secure favorable conditions for their operations, much like sovereign governments maneuver in international relations (Bollerman 2025; Galloway 2020; Matala and Stutz 2025). Digital platforms, global infrastructures, and quasi-sovereign firms shape markets (Sadraei et al. 2025). These conditions resemble the environmental turbulence Ansoff anticipated. The paper by Park and Antoniou outlines the architecture of this new ecosystem, which is ready for empirical testing. The field of strategic management suffers from weak epistemic hygiene. Good ideas fade when institutional support weakens. Bad theories accumulate when no system removes them (Aguinis et al. 2024; Block et al. 2023). AI systems now ingest the full scholarly archive, including the untested parts found online. This magnifies the problem. Current debates about AI hallucinations misdiagnose this problem (Gallegos et al. 2024). The deeper issue is epistemic inheritance. These models train on decades of management research that lacks systematic pruning, replication, or falsification. This weakness compounds. As a result, AI systems reproduce and amplify unresolved theoretical claims rather than correcting them. The field has not yet confronted this problem systematically. Bibliometric mapping, concept diffusion studies, and archival reconstructions, as developed by Zupic et al., Madsen, and recent work using the Ansoff Archive, provide the necessary starting tools. This agenda aligns with the evidence in the special issue. It does not aspire to rebuild the whole field of strategic management. It shows how revisiting Ansoff's empirical mindset opens concrete research paths. The direction is simple: test tools, study alignment, follow ideas through practice, and reconnect strategy research with real managerial problems. The guest editors sincerely thank Iacopo Cavallini, David Collins, Catherine Levitt, Ting-Hsiu Liao, Stefan Heusinkveld, Petra Kugler, Tamer Tamer Salameh, Kurt Verweire, and the authors who contributed their time, expertise, and constructive feedback to this special issue. Their careful evaluations and thoughtful suggestions have greatly enhanced the quality and rigor of the papers included. We are grateful for their dedication to advancing research in strategic management and for supporting the scholarly community through this critical peer-review process. The authors used ChatGPT-5 and Grammarly Premium to edit and refine the manuscript's language, style, and structure. The authors have reviewed and edited the output and take full responsibility for the content of this manuscript. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
Perspectives in Strategy: Mintzberg on the Influence of Ansoff Richard W. Puyt, Peter H. Antoniou Strategic Change, 2026 Highlights Ansoff's book Corporate Strategy shaped Mintzberg's early intellectual direction. In the early 1970s, Ansoff catalyzed the field by connecting European strategy scholars. His institutional groundwork culminated in the Strategic Management Society (1980). Mintzberg never engaged with Ansoff's holistic school; in interviews he seemed puzzled and never revised his own strategy schools framework. Beyond debate, Mintzberg remembered Ansoff with respect and affection.
From Taylor to TikTok: the historical evolution of management gurus Dag Øivind Madsen, Richard W. Puyt, Kåre Slåtten Journal of Management History, 2026 Purpose For more than a century, management gurus have played a visible role in shaping managerial discourse and popularizing new managerial ideas. This paper aims to examine the historical evolution of the management guru phenomenon by situating platform-era gurus within a century-long lineage of management fashions. It shows how successive communication technologies – from pamphlets and broadcast media to social media and algorithmic platforms – have reshaped the diffusion, legitimacy and visibility of managerial ideas. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts a historically informed, interpretive approach that integrates research on management fashions and guruism, the sociology of charisma, media history and digital platforms. It is based on secondary materials and qualitative observations of how management advice circulates across books, conferences and digital media. The analysis traces five historical eras of management guruism. Findings The paper identifies five eras of management guruism – industrial origins, managerial professionalization, the multimedia era, the early digital era and the platform era – each characterized by distinct diffusion infrastructures and authority logics. The platform era is interpreted as a phase of algorithmic amplification and fragmented authority in which visibility metrics increasingly structure managerial legitimacy and the performance of charisma. Originality/value This paper updates the study of management gurus for the digital and algorithmic age. By situating today’s influencers within a broader media and institutional history, it shows that platform-based guruism represents both continuity and mutation in the management fashion arena. More broadly, the framework clarifies how charisma, communication technologies and institutional authority coevolve in shaping who becomes authorized to speak for management and how managerial ideas diffuse across successive technological epochs.
The Evolution of Corporate Planning H. Igor Ansoff, Robert F. Stewart, Richard W. Puyt Strategic Change, 2026 This report, originally issued in September 1967 by the Long Range Planning Service (LRPS) of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and reproduced here as a historical document, traces the evolution of formal management and planning in US firms amid rising complexity, size, and technological change. Four stages emerge: (1) Implementation Cycle—directing and monitoring actions in stable settings; (2) Control Cycle—adding objective measurement against historical standards; (3) Extrapolative Planning—introducing forecasting, action programs, budgeting, and feasibility checks; (4) Entrepreneurial Planning—the advanced phase, with environmental scanning, strengths‐weaknesses analysis, objective setting, gap analysis, opportunity search, and strategic commitments. Each stage builds on the prior, shifting from reactive control to proactive, organized entrepreneurship. Advanced planning simulates the entrepreneurial genius by marshaling nine key talents: motivation (drive and energy), exposure (broad curiosity), sensitivity (insight into patterns), creativity (generating options), analysis (understanding consequences), judgment (wise selection amid uncertainty), leadership (inspiring followership), marshaling ability (organizing resources), and administrative ability (efficient organization and communication).
From SOFT approach to SWOT analysis, a historical reconstruction Richard W. Puyt, Finn Birger Lie, Dag Øivind Madsen Journal of Management History, 2025 Purpose The purpose of this study is to revisit the conventional wisdom about a key contribution [i.e. strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats (SWOT) analysis] in the field of strategic management. The societal context and the role of academics, consultants and executives is taken into account in the emergence of SWOT analysis during the 1960–1980 period as a pivotal development within the broader context of the satisfactory, opportunities, faults, threats (SOFT) approach. The authors report on both the content and the approach, so that other scholars seeking to invigorate indigenous theories and/or underreported strategy practices will thrive. Design/methodology/approach Applying a historiographic approach, the authors introduce an evidence-based methodology for interpreting historical sources. This methodology incorporates source criticism, triangulation and hermeneutical interpretation, drawing upon insights from robust evidence through three iterative stages. Findings The underreporting of the SOFT approach/SWOT analysis can be attributed to several factors, including strategy tools being integrated into planning frameworks rather than being published as standalone materials; restricted circulation of crucial long-range planning service/theory and practice of planning reports due to copyright limitations; restricted access to the Stanford Research Institute Planning Library in California; and the enduring popularity of SOFT and SWOT variations, driven in part by their memorable acronyms. Originality In the spirit of a renaissance in strategic planning research, the authors unveil novel theoretical and social connections in the emergence of SWOT analysis by combining evidence from both theory and practice and delving into previously unexplored areas. Research implications Caution is advised for scholars who examine the discrete time frame of 1960–1980 through mere bibliometric techniques. This study underscores the risks associated with gathering incomplete and/or inaccurate data, emphasizing the importance of triangulating evidence beyond scholarly databases. The paradigm shift of strategic management research due to the advent of large language models poses new challenges and the risk of conserving and perpetuating academic urban legends, myths and lies if training data is not adequately curated.
Setting the Record Straight: The Intellectual Legacy of H. Igor Ansoff (1918–2002) Richard W. Puyt Strategic Change, 2025 This study presents a comprehensive annotated bibliography of H. Igor Ansoff's intellectual contributions, addressing significant gaps in existing citation databases such as Scopus and Web of Science, which capture only 9 to 15 percent of his work. Leveraging the Ansoff Archive, this review systematically compiled and verified 165 unique publications, including 56 newly identified works, 29 missing or lost items, and 16 strategic consultancy tools. Through meticulous archival research, cross referencing, and international collaboration, metadata inaccuracies were corrected and Ansoff's global impact was documented, encompassing publications in sixteen languages and extensive consultancy work. The bibliography is organized chronologically and thematically, with detailed codes for corrections, missing works, and verifications. This resource enhances understanding of Ansoff's foundational role in strategic management, highlighting his concepts of strategic surprise and environmental turbulence, and provides avenues for future research on his influence on contemporary strategic frameworks and the broader historiography of management scholarship.
The Ansoff archive: Revisiting Ansoff's legacy and the holistic approach to strategic management Richard W. Puyt, Peter H. Antoniou, Andrea Caputo Strategic Change, 2024 This paper explores the profound influence and legacy of H. Igor Ansoff in the field of strategic management. Ansoff, a Russian‐American mathematician known as the father of strategic management, introduced groundbreaking concepts such as the Ansoff matrix and long‐range planning. The Ansoff Institute's recent initiative to establish the Ansoff Archives at the University of Twente underscores his enduring impact on strategic management research. This archive aims to preserve his intellectual contributions and support future scholarship. The paper reviews Ansoff's seminal works, including his influential publication Corporate Strategy (1965) and discusses his holistic approach to strategic change, which remains relevant in today's dynamic organizational environments. By commemorating Ansoff's contributions, the paper highlights the importance of his strategic frameworks in guiding contemporary issue management amidst unprecedented levels of uncertainty and change.
Evaluating ChatGPT-4’s historical accuracy: a case study on the origins of SWOT analysis Richard W. Puyt, Dag Øivind Madsen Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2024 In this study we test ChatGPT-4’s ability to provide accurate information about the origins and evolution of SWOT analysis, perhaps the most widely used strategy tool in practice worldwide. ChatGPT-4 is tested for historical accuracy and hallucinations. The API is prompted using a Python script with a series of structured questions from an Excel file and the results are recorded in another Excel file and rated on a binary scale. Our findings present a nuanced view of ChatGPT-4’s capabilities. We observe that while ChatGPT-4 demonstrates a high level of proficiency in describing and outlining the general concept of SWOT analysis, there are notable discrepancies when it comes to detailing its origins and evolution. These inaccuracies range from minor factual errors to more serious hallucinations that deviate from evidence in scholarly publications. However, we also find that ChatGPT-4 comes up with spontaneous historically accurate facts. Our interpretation of the result is that ChatGPT is largely trained on easily available websites and to a very limited extent has been trained on scholarly publications on SWOT analysis, especially when these are behind a paywall. We conclude with four propositions for future research.
The origins of SWOT analysis Richard W. Puyt, Finn Birger Lie, Celeste P.M. Wilderom Long Range Planning, 2023 The origins of SWOT analysis have been enigmatic, until now. With archival research, interviews with experts and a review of the available literature, this paper reconstructs the original SOFT/SWOT approach, and draws potential implications. During a firm's planning process, all managers are asked to write down 8 to 10 key planning issues faced by their units. Each manager grades, with evidence, these issues as either safeguarding the Satisfactory; opening Opportunities; fixing Faults; or thwarting Threats: hence SOFT (which is later merely relabeled to Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, or SWOT). Subgroups of managers have several dialogues about these issues with the instruction to include the needs and expectations of all the firm's stakeholders. Their developed resolutions or proposals become input for the executive planning committee to articulate corporate purpose(s) and strategies. SWOT's originator, Robert Franklin Stewart, emphasized the crucial role that creativity plays in the planning process. The SOFT/SWOT approach curbs mere top-down strategy making to the benefit of strategy alignment and implementation; Introducing digital means to parts of SWOT's original participative, long-range planning process, as suggested herein, could boost the effectiveness of organizational strategizing, communication and learning. Archival research into the deployment of SOFT/SWOT in practice is needed.
Origins of swot analysis Richard Puyt, Finn Birger Lie, Frank Jan De Graaf, Celeste P.M. Wilderom Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings, 2020
