Founded in 1995, strategy+business covers management theory and practice, long-term business and political trends, and the role and value of business in society. Our mission: to publish articles that help decision-makers see the world more clearly and to help set a more powerful, pragmatic, and beneficial long-term agenda for private-sector organizations — and for industrial society as a whole.

The magazine is published by a major management consulting firm (Booz & Company) and regularly draws on the firm for contributions and research, but it is deliberately designed and edited to provide an independent perspective. Each issue features some of the most significant thinkers and practitioners in management, either as contributors or as subjects of our interviews and “creative mind” profiles. In the past year, s+b has begun to expand its online range, starting with weekly “leading ideas” features. The magazine is the flagship publication of s+b Media, a multimedia platform that includes a Web site (www.strategy-business.com), e-newsletters, a self-published book series, commercially published books, events, and research conducted with such partners as the Wharton School of Business.

At s+b, we are aware that many business people find themselves at a turning point: solutions that worked in the past no longer produce results. Climate change, globalization, and changing demographics (among other factors) portend that some organizations will prosper by leading their industries (or their societies), and many will falter. Every major strategic decision is a bet on some theory about the way the world works; s+b tries to articulate the bets that business people are making, and the (implicit or explicit) reasons they are making them.

Reader profile: strategy+business reaches more than 120,000 readers. About one-third of them work in large corporations, another third are in consulting, and the rest are in smaller organizations, government, or academia. Most of the readers are decision-makers in management; more than 25 percent are at the director or senior vice president level.

These are some of my favorite articles and books from the last few years - projects that represent, for me, the high points of our work at s+b:

City Planet
By Stewart Brand
For the first time in human history, more than half the people in the world live in cities, and the shantytowns of emerging countries are hotbeds of creativity and culture.

Manufacturing's "Make or Break" Moment
By Kaj Grichnik and Condrad Winkler, with Jeffrey Rothfeder
America is not losing manufacturing jobs to China; poorly managed manufacturers are losing jobs to well-managed manufacturers. And there aren't nearly enough well-managed manufacturers.

Barbers, Beauty Parlors and Boardrooms
By Skip Griffin
One of the most effective leadership coaches I've met grew up in the civil rights movement - and says that organizational change takes place in the same way that the movement spread.

Lights! Water! Motion!
By Viren Doshi, Gary Schulman and Daniel Gabaldon
The world's urban infrastructure is hopelessly obsolete, and it will cost $40 trillion to fix - and that's if we do it efficiently and proactively. Two months after we published this I had to evacuate our mid-town Manhattan building because a steam pipe broke - and I realized that we are as much in danger from our own infrastructure as from terrorism.