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

Author:Walter Kiechel [Kiechel, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2010-03-02T22:00:00+00:00

10.

Struggling to Make

Something Actually

Happen

BY THE EARLY 1980S, the glorious phase of the strategy revolution was drawing to a close. The original lords had largely completed their foundational work. The essential paradigm had been created, widely installed, and rendered preeminent in the sense that every self-respecting corporation by this time knew it had to have a strategy. The consulting firms and academic departments that were to dominate the field had been established.

What happened next was what one would expect by way of a second, consolidating phase. Its unfolding proceeded simultaneously along two occasionally intersecting lines. The thrust of the first was carrying the gospel further into the world, to where it could change behavior; that of the second, taken up in the next chapter, refining the gospel.

With the new set of principles revealed and its detractors in disarray, the revolutionaries and their public found themselves increasingly grappling with the question of how to translate concepts into corporate practice. Or, as it was commonly put, how to implement strategy—or execute it, if you prefer (implement from the Latin “to fulfill,” execute from “follow to the end”). This was not something the consultants had been much inclined to think about; it lacked the flash and crisp bite of a fresh idea or analytic breakthrough. To help their clients address the issue, as the consultants were dragged into doing, the firms—and in particular BCG—would have to devise radically new ways of working, and not just with the top echelons.

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