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Research Summary Especially new firms need to be strategic flexible to proactively or reactively adjust to the market and internal demands as they aim to establish themselves. However, new firms vary in their degree of strategic flexibility. In this paper, we analyze resource management practices founders can use to increase the strategic flexibility of their firms. We depict how specific resource management practices can augment the strategic flexibility of a new firm in addition to the strategic flexibility resulting from their actual resource base. Scrutinizing innovative resource management practices in various domains, our findings especially underline the importance of specific innovative resource management practices in the financial domain to increase the strategic flexibility. Managerial Summary For entrepreneurs being independent is frequently the ultimate goal. Still, founders frequently find themselves in constraints that limit their freedom to act. In this research, we analyze various activities founders can undertake to increase the strategic flexibility of their firm. We find that specific practices in the financial resource management domain focusing on cash‐flow optimization such as quick customer payments and delaying supplier payments prove especially effective for providing more strategic flexibility for the nascent firms, while other ones do not appear to increase the strategic flexibility.

Le Breton-Miller and Miller argue that as the family becomes more embedded in the firm, the firm's decision makers become more susceptible to influence by the family, and agency problems rise for outside investors. We contend that the family's embeddedness in the business does not, in itself, explain whether the assumptions of agency theory are warranted. Our commentary offers an alternative way in which outside investors might look at family firms' goals. Outsiders should assess the complementarity of the family firm's objectives with their own if they are to make rewarding investments in family firms.

Given that gaining access to external resources is a critical component of entrepreneurial activity, a great deal of research has been done in an attempt to predict and explain this phenomenon. Unfortunately, this literature is largely scattered across a wide variety of somewhat disconnected research streams, which makes interpreting the insights that have been hitherto gained challenging. In response, the authors identify a sample of 76 relevant articles from the leading management and entrepreneurship journals that examine entrepreneurial access to resources. Using a narrative synthesis approach, they then organize these articles based on the strategies (projective and/or interpersonal) and tools (words, actions, associations and/or intangibles) by which entrepreneurs gain access to resources. Based on this categorization, the authors discuss the major themes in the extant literature and offer suggestions for how to move research on entrepreneurial access forward in the future.

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Throughout history, societies have been beset by disasters that took them by surprise, often with widespread and devastating consequences. When crops, animals, or people began dying with unusual frequency, especially when the causes were not observable, people often failed to respond, responded very slowly, or responded in surprisingly misdirected ways. In this essay, we focus on the role of leadership in addressing or failing to address such crises, paying special attention to the responses to the Covid-19 crisis during 2020. Our central thesis is that leadership hubris was a central (though not the only) culprit in poor responses, and we introduce the problem of inaction as a symptom of hubris. We conclude with some reflections for practitioners and researchers, suggesting a few areas worthy of examination to better understand how societies and business organizations may construct defenses against the dangers of leadership hubris. JEL CLASSIFICATION M14; L26; D70; N00