Many Facets of Leadership, The

Chapter 29. Strategy for the 21st Century: Portfolio Is Back

Maurice Saias and Olivier Tabatoni

Mechanistic strategic approaches are gone. Since the first oil crisis, turbulence has become the rule, leading to a drastic questioning of both our ways of thinking and our managerial practices. Most managers expect that sooner or later their own organization will experience some kind of discontinuous change. In these uncertain times, businesses that take nothing for granted will have an edge. It is time to reexamine how we anticipate and prepare for the future, given that the strategic toolboxes, which were developed in the 1960s and 1970s, are almost totally obsolete.

Nowadays, it is very hard to be a credible strategist, and the quest for the right ...