Over the last fifty years strategy has become the framework with which companies decide what they want to be. This hasn’t always been so. Indeed, only in the last fifty years have we invented the killer concepts to pull together all you need to know about costs, customers and competition. Learn how this happened.
In the early years the people responsible were—and this may come as a shock—management consultants. Only later did corporate types and academics get aboard. What took them so long?
The prime movers in this history—Bruce Henderson of the Boston Consulting Group, Bill Bain of Bain & Co., Fred Gluck of McKinsey and Michael Porter of Harvard Business School—were all mavericks, disruptive intellectual entrepreneurs quite willing to turn their worlds upside down. See how they did it, and what they had to overcome.
Pass the Word–or Else
As it turns out, Europeans got a bit of a head start having their defective Toyotas fixed. Yoshimi Inaba, head of the company’s North American operations, admitted to a congressional committee last week that in response to complaints ...
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Walter Kiechel III has spent thirty years as a business journalist, along the way serving as the editor of Fortune magazine and editorial director of Harvard Business Publishing. A few souls may remember his book Office Hours: A Guide to the Managerial Life. Read Full Bio