"Strategic positioning" is not the same as "strategic planning." Strategic planning often becomes a vacuous intellectual exercise that does not result in organizational change. "Strategic positioning," on the other hand, is an exercise in creating and maintaining a first-class organization, which can mean the difference between being competitive and becoming irrelevant. The essence of strategic positioning is to develop the organization and its leadership to do three things: set the agenda for where it wants to go, create its own future, and become opportunity-driven rather than threat-driven. Strategic choices, leadership styles, and the ability to learn (and unlearn) play an important role in making strategic endeavors work well. When properly implemented, strategic positioning counteracts the organizational disabilities of reactive fear and intellectual rigidity in their early stages and replaced them with healthy, proactive alternatives. Grasping the initiative to shape an organizational context that will ensure a competitive, vibrant, healthy, fiscally rigorous and humane decision-making environment for the courts is the ultimate challenge to judicial leaders in the 1990's. 5-item bibliography