Name: The lords of strategy
ISBN: 9781591397823

The lords of strategy

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.

What Hacker News says

spamizbadNov 2020

Even if you're not a fan of management consulting I think giving The Lords of Strategy by Walter Kiechel a read is worthwhile to understanding why they are such a big part of our world. It gives a good modern history of the profession and how they made such a profound impact on the business world.

I think ultimately what happened was most of what made them famous in the 60s, 70s, and 80s has largely become standard business practice. With the low hanging fruit gone they've moved onto laundering accountability and/or very expensive side-steps of corporate bureaucracy.

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spamizbadOct 2012

Consulting companies built their reputations on their work in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. They encouraged companies to do things we now consider Business 101 (it was cutting-edge stuff back then though). Several major companies in the 1960s had no insight into their competitors or even a full picture of the market they were in. These were the sort of organizations that collected very little data beyond sales and balance sheet figures - it was like they lived in a "bubble". The pioneering consulting firms popped those bubbles and actually taught businesses how to do basic market analysis, and turn that analysis into business strategy.

If you're at all curious, I'd recommend reading The Lords of Strategy by Walter Keichel, which a (albeit opinionated) history of the consulting practice.

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neomOct 2018

Not sure if these count as textbooks by most peoples measures, but they have been textbooks for me.

[1]Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team

[2]The Wal-Mart Triumph: Inside the World’s #1 Company

[3]Guerilla Marketing

[4]The Lords of Strategy

[5]Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

[6] The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive

[7]The Deming Management Method

[8]Creativity Inc.

[9]The Wisdom of Teams

[10]On Communication

[11]On Managing Yourself

[12]The Art of Facilitation

[13]Death by Meeting

[14]Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning

[15]Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business

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JumpCrisscrossJun 2014

> I'd say Google is for control as much as Apple, I'll concede openness vs. privacy which both sound like something spouted out by a suit.

Naturally they are both vying for leverage. To borrow a line from The Lords of Strategy, "the key way to think about competitive advantage is to think about how to design ecology in such a way to achieve goals you’re trying to pursue" [1].

Apple monetises device sales. It fiercely protects those sales by ensuring everything one does in its ecosystem is done through its devices. That fortification gives it more freedom with user data, which it can play against Google by encrypting and anonymizing its users' activity.

Google, on the other hand, monetises its access to user data. It fiercely protects that access by ensuring everything one does in its ecosystem runs through its servers. That fortification gives it more freedom with devices and standards, which it can play against Apple by encouraging modularity, adaptability, and customisation.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Lords-Strategy-Intellectual-Corpor...

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