Lords of Strategy

Imagine, if you can, a 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 teams instigated a profound shift in thinking that turbocharged business as never before, with implications far beyond what even they imagined. In 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; and 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 revolutionised the way we think about business, changed the very soul of the corporation, and transformed the way we work.