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"The last decade witnessed the meteoric rise of Chinese tech players, especially the internet firms, which rely on (mobile) internet as the main distribution channel to reach out to hundreds of millions of customers, and use internet-enabled technologies, such as logistics, supply chain management, credit assessment and cloud computing, to serve customer demands, and reform/disrupt traditional industries. These Chinese firms not only include the well-known giants, such as Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance (parent of TikTok), but also many others who are worth tens of billions but still under the radar of global business communities, such as SheIn, Transsion, J&T express. These firms have collectively built a formidable presence in every aspect of life across cities in China over a few years. As growth in China slows down, and competition further intensifies, these giants are increasingly setting their sight on the global markets. Despite early mistakes and setbacks by a few large firms, including Baidu and Alibaba, waves of Chinese companies, armed with capital, experience, and talent, are expanding in different regions across the globe, copying each other's successes and learning from each other's failures"--

We examine how chief executive officer (CEO) narcissism influences the interorganizational imitation of corporate strategy. We theorize that narcissistic CEOs are influenced more by the corporate strategies they experienced on other boards and less by the corporate strategies experienced by other directors. These effects are strengthened if the other firms to which the CEO has interlock ties have high status and if the CEO is powerful. Through longitudinal analyses of Fortune 500 companies' decisions (from 1997 to 2006) related to the acquisition emphasis of a firm's growth strategy and the firm's level of international diversification, we show that narcissistic CEOs are influenced by corporate strategies that they witnessed at other firms much more than other CEOs. In addition, relatively narcissistic CEOs not only strongly resist the influence of other directors' prior experience but also tend to demonstrate their superiority by adopting corporate strategies that are the opposite of what fellow directors' prior experience would suggest. Our theory and results highlight how CEO narcissism limits directors' influence over corporate strategy and influences CEOs' learning and information processing in making strategic decisions.

Countering the widely held view that chief executive officer (CEO) succession is generally beneficial in turnaround situations, we adopt an executive fit/refit logic, proposing that the implications of CEO replacement depend integrally on the incumbent's degree of misfit and the successor's degree of fit to the contextual conditions at hand. Drawing from prior turnaround research, we identify several prominent forms of CEO fit/misfit that are especially germane to troubled firms. In testing our hypotheses, we find substantial support for the fit/refit theory: troubled companies have substantially better performance to the extent that they replace incumbents who are poorly suited to the conditions at hand and when they appoint new CEOs who are well matched to those conditions. Further reaffirming the fit/refit model, we find that CEO replacement per se has no general effect on the improvement of troubled firms.

We provide large-scale empirical evidence of how much chief executive officers (CEOs) change corporate culture. To do this, we use employee reviews to measure corporate cultural change in S&P 1500 firms. In a variance decomposition analysis, we find a modest effect of CEOs on corporate cultural change. The effect of CEOs on cultural change is larger than industry effect but smaller than firm effect. Regression analysis in the context of CEO succession further shows consistent evidence of a modest effect of CEO succession on corporate cultural change. In addition, the relationship between CEOs and cultural change is not likely to be fully explained by time trend, reverse causality, sample selection bias, and omitted variable bias. An investigation into the contextual contingencies of the CEO-cultural change relationship suggests that succession characteristics, such as predecessor influence and turnaround situation, weaken postsuccession cultural change, but industry task environment has a weak moderation effect. Overall, our study contributes to the literature on strategic leadership and corporate culture. Funding: X. Li acknowledges financial support from the Ian Potter ('93D) PhD Award. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.17210 .

In the last few years, we have seen a meteoric rise of Chinese tech companies across the world. Alibaba stock price movements unnerved investors globally, venture capitalists searched for the next Meituan or Pinduoduo in Southeast Asia and Latin America, and of course, Tik Tok, the most popular content platform in the world today, originated from China. The founders of such companies are typically credited with the "tenacity to rough it out" and the "vision to take their companies to new heights." However, the same can be said about Silicon Valley founders, or any successful entrepreneur. So, what gives Chinese founders and their companies the advantage in becoming multi-billion global enterprises? How does their leadership set strategies? How do they motivate their people? How do they move so fast and defend their turf in China's hyper-competitive tech market? When they expand overseas, how do they determine what they keep and what they need to let go of? And most importantly, what do these things mean to you as a competitor, investor, regulator, or even as an executive or customer of such companies? Seeing the Unseen: Behind Chinese Tech Giants' Global Venturing answers these questions and delves into the fascinating world of Chinese logic that shapes how tech leaders make and implement decisions, many of which are seldom seen outside China