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

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 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

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