Lords of Strategy

14.

The RevolutionConquers the World

THE WANING YEARS OF the twentieth century brought a steady barrage of new questions for strategy. Will the Internet destroy my business model? We’ve retrenched for years; now how do we grow? Those bastards from abroad are killing us; we give up; how do we become a global competitor ourselves? Predictably, consultants and professors would try to supply companies with fresh answers.

But while the ideas hawked as new at the turn of the twenty-first century—“deconstructing” strategy to take into account the blowing to bits of traditional value chains, growing from the core, strategy as a portfolio of initiatives—did manage to move the ball down the field a few yards, they hardly invented a new game. In 2005, ...