Great to see SMS ask if there should be Certification in strategic management. I’ve raise before the need for this to be a truly professional discipline, so we can nail what should be expected of robust leadership of this critical role. A conference session will ask some intriguing questions:

• Is there demand for such a credential? From whom? How large?
• Is the knowledge base of the field sufficiently developed and established to offer a certificate?
• What is the expected value-added?
• Should different levels of certification be considered, e.g. for professionals, trainers/educators, institutions?
• What kind of institutional arrangements would support certification?
• Who should be involved in steering the development and implementation of certification?
• What should be the role of SMS, Universities, executives and consulting firms?

A long way to go – SMS as apparently the leading international Society in the field has just 2,500 members, mostly academics, compared with the hundreds of thousands of practising professionals in established fields. And it is quite shocking that the second question can even be raised – after over 50 years of vast and costly effort, how can it even be conceivable that we don’t know enough about what constitutes professional strategy analysis and management to check if someone knows what they are doing!