Lords of Strategy

13.

How CompetenciesCame to Be Core

FROM THE 1980S ON, the imperatives of shareholder capitalism would hang over the strategy revolution. But the revolutionaries didn’t always pay much attention. Blame the fact that by then, an establishment of consultants and scholars had already grown up to tend strategy’s flame, and this far from the clamor of Wall Street. Which helps explain an abiding irony: much work done under the name of strategy has less than an ineluctable effect on a company’s stock price. At firms such as a BCG and McKinsey, consultants who take improving that price as their primary concern come across as specialists, slightly outside the mainstream. As the rationalization goes, many variables can get in the way between the strategy ...