Italians like to wear their qualifications where everyone can see them. Accountants style themselves Ragioniere, architects are always Architetto, and so on. Corporate chieftains whose business successes have long since overshadowed their academic achievements hang on to the handle: so Fiat’s Gianni Agnelli was always l’Avvocato, Carlo De Benedetti is still l’Ingegnere. I used to be rather proud to receive letters addressed to “Egregio Dott. Hill”, when I worked in Milan, until I realised protocol dictated that every university graduate was a Dottore or Dottoressa.

If the Strategic Planning Society has its way, Italians will have to break out a new honorific: Stratega, or possibly Strategista. The SPS, a 45-year-old charity that says it is the world’s oldest organisation of its kind, is throwing its weight behind the development of strategy as a formal discipline, complete with codes, courses, qualifications and a cadre of professionals with certified status: it already offers associate membership for business school students, up to fellowship for experienced “senior strategists”. A conference hosted by Oxford university’s Sa?d Business School will today attempt to map out what this might involve.

There is something faintly comical about the idea. Professors and strategy directors will duke it out among academe’s gleaming spires and ivory towers, while executives from Bonn to Beijing cope with the real-world consequences of a crisis few forecast and a future nobody can predict. Let the slide presentations commence!