Yealands Wine Group Holdings Limited has an exciting future and Peter Yealands (founder) and Jason Judkins (CEO) were celebrating. They felt that Yealands was in a strong position going forward and the new partnership with Marlborough Lines offered exciting future possibilities. However, they knew that the company faced many strategic issues that needed to be addressed. They also wanted to ensure that they were able to achieve their growth plans by 2020: lifting sales from 1 to 2 million cases a year, wine processing capacity from 20,000 tonnes to 30,000 tonnes and turnover from $100 million to $150 million. To meet their intended projections, what direction should they grow in? And how?

Strong performing companies often have intents that state their ambitions for the future and this will be clearly communicated to stakeholders by the chief executive officer. The chief executive officer should lead company strategy and play the key role in establishing and communicating the strategic intent. This conceptual paper uses insights mainly from the strategy process and corporate governance literature to build better understanding of how a business can achieve a strong sense of strategic intent to inform their strategy work. Three dimensions of the strategic intent construct are identified – shared vision, resource focus and foresight. Through the development of a series of research propositions a substantial future research agenda is offered in an area where the literature is quite limited. Points of interest to the strategy practice field are also discussed.

On 13 September 2012, the Good George Brewery and bar opened for business in the Hamilton, New Zealand suburb of Frankton. This case describes the start of the business, the environment that supported it and the resources and capabilities that were utilised. The case won the ANZAM award for best case study at the 2013 ANZAM Conference.

Several influential writers including Henry Mintzberg and Gary Hamel have highlighted the need for organizations to value the contribution to strategy work of middle managers in an uncertain world. In this study quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews are used to mix methods and investigate the role of middle managers in strategy-making process in Australia. The results indicate that middle managers are the ‘doers’ of strategy, with important ‘analyst’, ‘coordinator’, ‘information source’ and ‘communicator’ roles. Middle managers reported some frustration in interviews that at times they feel their input to strategic conversations is not translated effectively into organization strategy.