Introduction to the Special Issue Honoring Richard Rumelt: The Foundations for Understanding Fundamental Issues in Strategy

Richard Rumelt should be heralded not just because of his publications and scholarly contributions to the field of strategy but also because of his style and ability and willingness to find answers to complex problems. He combines the pragmatism of the engineer with the “bright guy” approach to management issues. This has allowed him to generate both incisive analyses of specific cases and important theoretical findings of general relevance.

He is perhaps the last and the best of a set of scholars that came out of the Harvard Business School tradition of seeing problems as they are, not as we...