This chapter explores the history of “total war” in the Republic of China, from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. Despite not taking part directly in the First World War, Chinese officers, strategists, and political leaders exhibited considerable interest in the notion of “total war” that became popular in its wake. With the full-blown Japanese invasion of 1937, the transnational circulation of strategic ideas gave way to practical concerns about general mobilization for a conflict of unprecedented dimensions and stakes. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime survived the Second World War only to be destroyed by its Chinese Communist opponent, but it continued tapping pre-war ideas and wartime experiences of total war/mobilization to make sense of civil war – and defeat.

This chapter explores strategy as a key driver of organizational design, emphasizing that structure should align with strategic intent. It introduces four strategic archetypes: reactors (no clear strategy), defenders (efficiency-focused), prospectors (innovation-driven), and analyzers (balancing both). It also discusses digital business strategy, showing how AI and digitalization reshape decision-making, operations, and innovation. Sustainable strategy is introduced, integrating economic, environmental, and social goals (People, Planet, Profit) to enhance resilience and competitiveness. The chapter concludes with strategy misfits – misalignments between strategy and goals – and the need to adjust one or the other. It ends by addressing how the environment influences strategic choices.

In this concluding chapter, we give community strategy its due place in sustainability governance and recapitulate key insights from the previous chapters. Narrative appears in a variety of roles yet is unlikely to do its work as a catalyst of community action if it does not take its place within strategy. Such institutionalization does come with risk, including ossification and the introduction of blind spots. We coin a new leadership function, tightly coupled with the role of strategist: The management of goal dependencies and reality effects associated with community strategy. Strategy appears appropriate as a topic to conclude our interpretive account of sustainability leadership as it is, in part, a narrative itself and as the building of strategic capacity in a community is the culminating point of leadership work, requiring other features of good sustainability to be in place.

Suicide prevention requires a systematic approach to develop a framework that brings together different elements of a prevention strategy, including surveillance, mental health service access, restriction of lethal means, and public awareness campaigns. Originating with Finland's pioneering efforts in the 1980s, such strategies have since expanded worldwide, driven by the World Health Organization's call for action and alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals. It is imperative that these programmes/strategies are evidence-based, informed by local research, continuously monitored and regularly evaluated for effectiveness. By developing suicide prevention programmes/strategies, governments around the world show their commitment to mitigating preventable deaths, underscoring the need for sustained funding, leadership, and research-driven implementation.

This chapter opens Part I of the book, focusing on social media as a digital participatory space. It examines the relationship between the state and platform firms in social media governance over two consecutive leaderships. It firsts map the landscape of social media platforms in China and the variety of participatory spaces they offer. Based on survey data, it identifies two platform companies that have evolved into important players in managing social media platforms with a significant reach in political information – Tencent and Sina. It then examines the significant changes in social media governance over two consecutive leaderships. Under Hu, social media governance was characterized by loose command and control with many choices for users, while popular corporatism emerged at the end of the Hu Jintao leadership and took off under Xi Jinping. Based on procurement data, the chapter elaborates on the state’s reasoning to rely on Tencent and Sina as the only corporations with the expertise and resources to provide key services in managing online public opinion. Its findings demonstrate that under popular corporatism large platform firms can leverage their superior expertise, data, infrastructure, and reach to gain concessions from the state due to their consultant and/or insider status.

CEO hubris is a vital construct in research on the psychology of organisational decision-makers. Hubristic CEOs influence strategic decisions, from acquisitions to product and geographic market entry. To date, research has mainly focused on how and when CEO hubris impacts CEOs and their organisations. I offer a framework in which CEOs predisposed to inflated self-evaluation engage in behavioural processes that yield overconfident strategic decisions associated with hubris. The framework reviews and summarises how such evaluations stem from CEOs’ psychological and social circumstances. It then links inflated self-evaluation to the three drivers of over-confidence that are associated with hubris: over-estimation, or the tendency to exaggerate prospective outcomes; over-placement, or the tendency to rank one’s capabilities and situation ahead of others; and over-precision, or the tendency to issue unduly bounded or narrow forecasts which tend to be inaccurate. The framework is illustrated by the case study of Elizabeth Holmes, formerly founder and CEO of Theranos, who was lauded as a celebrity entrepreneur before being convicted of crimes associated with her hubris.

By focusing on the British blockade of Germany, the prevailing narrative over-privileges one aspect of the use of food for belligerent purposes during the First World War. Blockade was not just Britain’s concern. France played a key role in its implementation, especially in respect to land routes and in the Mediterranean. Also, it was not just imposed in the Atlantic approaches. The other seas lapping both Europe and western Asia were vehicles for the application of sea power. In addition, starvation was not just an instrument of maritime warfare: it was also used by armies. Nor was Germany the only target; so too were its allies: Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. How the blocking of maritime trade affected their fighting power varied, depending on the management of their domestic food production, their distribution networks and their agricultural workforces. The blockade may have looked like a blunt instrument but its effectiveness depended on its interactions with other conditions, not all of them under governmental or even human control.

This chapter describes German and Soviet strategies for the year 1942 and covers operations from May 1942 to March 1943. These includes the Soviet offensive towards Kharkiv, German preliminary operations such as the conquering of Sevastopol and the Kerch peninsula, but also operations on other sections of the Eastern Front like Soviet offensives against Rzhev and the German operation ‘Whirlwind’. However, the focus is on the German summer offensive and the Battle of Stalingrad. By linking these events to the operations along the eastern front as well as decisions and events outside the eastern theatre, the chapter argues that Germany’s failure in 1942 was a consequence of Allied superiority in men and material, but also of a German leadership that underestimated Soviet warfare capabilities. The German command wanted to achieve too many objectives with too few resources in too short a period of time. This failure was part of a larger turn of the tide in the war, that finally led to the Axis defeat.

This chapter is focused on game theory and mechanism design, presenting them as an important branch of analytics science that has impacted our world. Like all other chapters, it starts by presenting the big picture ideas, and showcasing various real-world examples in which those ideas have been impactful. It educates the reader though various familiar examples such as the simple decisions involved in cutting a cake and more critical decision-making scenarios such as what happened during the Battle of the Bismarck Sea or finding ways to reduce racial segregation in the society, and from policies that revolutionized life-saving ideas for those who are in dire need of transplantation to governments’ complex efforts in improving voting mechanisms. The chapter provides engaging stories showcasing how the main ideas in game theory and mechanism design have been impactful in a myriad of ways.