1 Morten Huse 1 What matters most for our scholarly community: Reflections from former AOM presidents 2 ABSTRACT Management research has during recent years been subject to critical attention, and there have been calls for redirections. There have been calls for redirections towards what matters most and scholarship with impact. In this paper I present reflections about the future of scholarship. AOM (The Academy of Management) has become an important premise vendor for international management research. The Presidents of AOM all have a reflecting presidential address at the end of their presidential period. They typically address what they see as the most important issues or challenges for the AOM, for management research and for scholarship in general. In order to embed suggestions for redirection of research, I made an analyses of these presidential addresses over twenty-five years. I found that many of them have raised similar concerns. The AOM presidents have argued that management research suffers from a too narrow view of scholarship, theory and practice are not connected, and an audit culture with negative consequences. INTRODUCTION The conduct of management research is increasingly criticized from several perspectives and sources (e.g. Aguinis, Shapiro, Antonacopoulou & Cummings, 2014; Honig, Lampel, Siegel & Drevichal, 2017; Pettigrew, 2011; Tsui, 2013). The criticism is related to various aspects of the message, audience and channels of our research, as well as to concerns about the future of our scholarly identity. Its importance has been addressed in recent keynote presentations at main management conferences as for example the 2018 of Academy of Management (AOM), 1 I first met Torger Reve in 1972. We were then both students at NHH. He was senior, while I was junior. As he returned to NHH after his PhD studies in USA in the beginning of the 1980’s I started following him on my journey into academia and the scholarly profession. I have been a member of AOM since 1989, but my first AOM meeting was not till the Atlanta meeting in 1993. There I listened to Donald Hambrick’s Presidential Address “What if the academy really mattered”. During this meeting I got highly involved in the AOM organization, I have listened to most of the AOM Presidential Addresses from 1993-2018, and my involvement in the AOM organization led me for several years to personal knowledge of and relationships with its presidents. They have together with Torger Reve influenced me in my understanding of academia and the scholarly profession. 2 This paper leans on a book I am writing about changing the game for research. The book is inspired by an ERC (European Research Council) Advance Grant I applied for in 2017. I will thank many of the previous AOM Presidents for comments, and particularly Jean Bartunek and Jim Walsh for inspiration and several detailed suggestions.