Corporate Plasticity: How to Change, Adapt, and Excel

The Starting Point

For decades, executives have driven improvement along two dimensions: corporate strategy and functional excellence. And despite the many well-intentioned attempts to make management a reliable science, the outcomes have been mixed.

Corporate history is full of counterintuitive case examples and mysteries that management science fails to comprehend or explain. Why, for example, does one leader in the photographic film and paper industry nearly cease to exist while the other transforms into an imaging company and thrives in the digital world? Why does one carmaker successfully introduce a platform strategy while another fails miserably? How was a maker of rubber boots capable of dominating the mobile phone industry for decades? ...