Learning from Crisis, Leading Through Change

Special Issue Editorial

Abstract

Editor’s Note

Welcome to this special issue of the Applied Business & Management Review. In keeping with the journal’s mission to bridge academic rigor and real-world application, this issue brings together four book reviews and two managerial perspectives. Their subjects differ widely, yet they share one question: how do organizations, institutions and leaders respond when the ground shifts beneath them?

Two of the book reviews approach this question through crisis. Amine Mahdoud examines Public Policies in Crisis: 2008 and Its Aftermath, which shows that the 2008 financial crisis changed public policy only when institutions, actors and prior trajectories allowed it. Oumaima Omari Haraké revisits Edgar Morin’s Let’s Change Lanes: The Lessons of Coronavirus, which reads the Covid-19 pandemic as a revealing event and calls for complex, interconnected thinking. The third review, by Aimad Amzil, turns to Leading the African Enterprise in the Era of Digital Transformation and Artificial Intelligence and asks what digital change demands of African business leaders, with illustrations from Morocco. The fourth, by Bechara El Nammar, revisits Andrew S. Grove’s High Output Management and asks whether its output-based view of managerial effectiveness still suits knowledge-intensive workplaces.

The two managerial perspectives bring the discussion closer to practice. M. F. Harake argues that service learning can help business schools develop responsible, community-minded leaders. Jean-Michel Viola and Desislava Yankova offer a conceptual framework for understanding coopetition in technological ecosystems, drawing on patent data from the telecommunications sector.

Read together, these contributions suggest a shared lesson: neither a crisis, a new technology nor a new curriculum changes anything on its own. Outcomes depend on the skills, institutions, relationships and choices that surround them. For managers, this is a reminder to diagnose their own context before adopting a solution. For researchers, it is an invitation to look beyond headline events and examine the mechanisms behind them.

This issue also reflects the journal’s international character. Several of the reviewed works were written in French, and the reviews make this scholarship accessible to English-language readers, while the authors write from Morocco, France and Spain. As a matter of transparency, we remind readers that contributions to the Book Reviews and Managerial Perspectives sections are not peer-reviewed. They are evaluated by the editorial team for their practical relevance, clarity and originality, and their views remain those of their authors.

We thank the authors for their contributions and our readers for their interest. We hope this issue prompts reflection and discussion, and we warmly invite researchers, practitioners and early-career scholars to submit their work to future issues.