Health Care Management Review addresses both a practitioner and a research audience. Our goal is to offer articles that inform future research and affect how health services organizations are managed. Looking at the field through this lens one cannot help but notice that a significant number of the individuals who are active in health services research and management, publish journal articles, or attend the professional meetings have moved back and forth between research and practice or work in both simultaneously. In addition, most of them teach managers or clinicians. This complex set of activities puts them in the potent position to apply their research in management practice and use their knowledge of management as they conduct research. And, of course, both fields can fertilize what happens in the classroom.

Over time we also noticed that there is limited opportunity for individuals who have successfully negotiated these complex activities to share their experiences, and perhaps more importantly, offer them to others who may be contemplating such moves but don't know what to expect or how to achieve an integrated life that benefits from past and new experiences.

This FORUM provides an opportunity to observe how the different fields influence each other. It features individuals who have either focused mostly on practice; moved back and forth between practice and academia sequentially, or worked in both areas simultaneously. Their articles are insightful and honest. They illustrate the joys of bridging diverse fields as well as the tensions that can arise between them. We see how what a manager does influences the research questions that are asked or how findings are interpreted; how research influences what the person does in the board room; how research or management practice find their way into case discussions in the class room; and how management becomes teaching, or teaching becomes management.

We are grateful to Robert Lunn, Renee Stiles, Andrew Dahl, and Anthony Kovner for their candor and reflections on this interesting topic.