Seven Chapters of Strategic Wisdom

A shortcut to the big themes in the conversation about corporate strategy.

Bring Strategy Back from the Dead

The vultures are circling. ‘Strategy, as we knew it, is dead,’ proclaims Walt Shill, head of Accenture’s North American consulting practice. A January 25 Wall Street Journal article quotes him explaining, ‘Corporate clients decided that increased flexibility and accelerated decision-making are much more important than simply predicting the future.’ A recent white paper from the Boston Consulting Group hung similar crepe. In its research on … [ Read more ]

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

In what amounts to a vigorous defense of management consultants, Kiechel explains how business became an intellectual endeavor over the last half century, maturing from commonsense practice to theory-driven discipline, and how ideas now underpin the way corporations function today. “What companies didn’t have before the strategy revolution,” he writes, “was a way of systematically putting together all the elements that determined their corporate fate.”

In … [ Read more ]

Walter Kiechel

A good strategy starts with a comparable knowledge of how your company is situated along three critical dimensions—costs, customers, and competition.