Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World

Kiechel, who previously held editorial management positions at Harvard Business Publishing and Fortune magazine, covers the growth in corporate strategy planning and related business consulting enterprises since the 1960s. He focuses in particular on four men who guided the developments, but also explores aspects of the ideas themselves. Considering the current financial crisis, Kiechel talks about the need for consulting firms to develop more adaptive strategies, but avoids placing most of the blame at their feet. He instead describes their replacement by "quants," who were at the forefront of the ascendency of the quantitative view. He also explores the fate of the auto companies that never took consulting seriously. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Imagine, if you can, the world of business - without corporate strategy. Remarkably, fifty years ago that's the way it was. Businesses made plans, certainly, but without understanding the underlying dynamics of competition, costs, and customers. It was like trying to design a large-scale engineering project without knowing the laws of physics. But in the 1960s, four mavericks and their posses created instigated a profound shift in thinking that turbocharged business as never before, with implications far beyond what even they imagined. In The Lords of Strategy, renowned business journalist and editor Walter Kiechel tells, for the first time, the story of the four men who invented corporate strategy as we know it and set in motion the modern, multibillion-dollar consulting industry:Bruce Henderson, founder of Boston Consulting Group Bill Bain, creator of Bain & Company Fred Gluck, longtime Managing Director of McKinsey & Company Michael Porter, Harvard Business School professorProviding a window into how to think about strategy today, Kiechel tells their story with novelistic flair. At times inspiring, at times nearly terrifying, this book is a revealing account of how these iconoclasts and the organizations they led revolutionized the way we think about business, changed the very soul of the corporation, and transformed the way we work.