Lords of Strategy

12.

The Wizards ofFinance DiscloseStrategy’s TruePurpose

WHAT IS A COMPANY FOR? To what end do we create and toil in such entities? Nowadays, for most who give any thought to the matter, the answer seems boringly obvious: the purpose of a corporation is to enrich its owners, usually its shareholders. But in fact, agreement on this point has been arrived at only recently, starting in the 1980s largely as the product of newly discovered opportunities to make money. The strategy revolution in itself didn’t lead to the triumph of shareholder capitalism, but those leading its charge seized on strategy’s tenets as precisely the intellectual underpinnings they needed for their battle plans. In particular, they loved Greater Taylorism. The resultant ...