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

I accidentally order this book, but fortunately my brother need it. So I just gave him. BTW This book has a nice looking. My brother loved it.

Lords of Strategy is certainly one of the most comprehensive books on the subject. It traces the evolution of strategy, as taught and practiced from its simplistic beginnings to the present state, and from perspectives of Consulting firms, Business Schools and the Wall Street. Accounts of how various consulting companies adopted and contributed to the evolution of strategic management is fascinating.The author writes brilliantly and explored several dimensions in a very dense text. Lost some steam towards the last chapter on financial crisis and became rhetoric, but on balance a must read for students and practitioners of strategy.

It is highly recommend to those who want to understand the reasons behind corporate decision making. It also opens upthe issue of the role of government regulations that can mitigate uncontrolled spending of profits on shareholder value by direct compensation instead of smart R&D spending and employee enhancement.

This book has been four years in my bookshelf but earlier I only had read the preface. The book puts the well-known methods of strategy in historic context and describes how they have been developed as well as the people behind them. It also describes the stories of some big consultancy firms. There are many other summaries, but here are lots of anecdotes and even humour, the book is fun.I'm not going to describe the content by rewriting, just some of the impressions and conclusions I got from it.The author says not much has happened since the 1990s. Strategy has lost at least some of its relevance and attraction.The book reaffirms my long-time perception (as a consultant) that strategy as we have learnt to know it is a tired discipline. It lives the era of Brezhnevian stagnation. Not all, maybe half of it is obsolete even toxic, waste of money and time, like in advertising, but which half? On the other hand, huge and fast value migrations prove that there is a need for something new that timeshifts and teleports the ideas of the 1970s to the reality of the 2010s.But unlike the author, I think much has happened in the last twenty or so years, there is a tacit "new strategy" but still as a patchwork of fragmented ideas, nobody has yet written a big synthesis, like Michael Porter wrote on "classic strategy" a generation ago. "New strategy" is still pieces of rock in need of sculptor and glue.Concepts and pragmatic tools - one-pagers such as the growth-share matrix, the five forces framework and the value chain aka business system - have been formative to strategy and legitimated it. In the 1960s, the big issues to be solved were portfolio and positioning, due to deregulation, antitrust legislation and growth. In the 1980s and 1990s the issues were process management and execution. I guess today the big issue is digital transformation. The author searches for a new strategy of the 2000s in four dimensions, risk management (in the aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis), networking and boundaries, purpose, and people.My other perception is how shaky the foundations of "classic strategy" are. The chair needs more legs. Maybe, in addition to economics, "new strategy" must look more at technology together with system and complexity theories.A common explanation of the diminishing relevance is the increased dynamics. There is very little about dynamics in "classic strategy". I guess this should be seen as a methodological challenge and as an increased need instead of lost relevance. Something "new" is needed, more practical than "disruption", and it must handle dynamics and technology with entrepreneurial people.The only critique is that - probably due to the journalistic background of the author - in some places the writing style is long, curly and unstructured. For a non-English and maybe not so intellectual reader like me some words are too rare. This is like fine dining and slow food when I expect fast food that comes from a clear menu. But now I also understand why some articles in Harvard Business Review have been similar, as the author writes, they have been ghostwritten by journalists.

Haven't read it yet, a friend from Singapore was interested in it more.