Lords of Strategy

Coda: The Future of Strategy

AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME that the global financial system was freezing up, the Boston Consulting Group canvassed nearly twenty global companies—corporate titans from India and Japan as well as Europe and the United States—on the giants’ latest thinking about strategy. More than one replied with a version of, “We don’t do strategy.”

Attentive students of the subject’s history won’t be shocked by this. They will recall Michael Porter’s concern in the early 1990s that companies had largely abandoned strategy in favor of more faddish pursuits. Or the backlash in the early 1980s, when corporate disappointment over the failure of strategic planning to deliver on its early promises led to widespread cutbacks in internal ...