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 professor
Providing 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.
Table of Contents
Preface: Three Common Suppositions to Be Discarded
1. Strategy as a Case to Be Cracked
2. Bruce Henderson Defines the Subject
3. The Experience Curve Delivers a Shock
4. Loading the Matrix
5. What Bill Bain Wanted
6. Waking Up McKinsey
7. Michael Porter Encounters the Surreal
8. The Human Stain
9. The Paradigm That Failed?
10. Struggling to Make Something Actually Happen
11. Breaking the World Into Finer Pieces
12. The Wizards of Finance Reveal Strategy’s True Purpose
13. How Competencies Came to Be Core
14. The Revolution Conquers the World
15. Three Versions of Strategy as People
Coda: The Future of Corporate Strategy
368 pages, Hardcover