Strategy in Practice: A Practitioner's Guide to Strategic Thinking, 3rd Edition

Preface to the Third Edition

This third edition of Strategy in Practice is being published in the aftermath of what has been an exceptionally prolonged economic crisis. By most accounts, the difficult period marked by double- and triple-dip relapses of the economy is over. Once again buoyant Wall Street earnings appear to support that view.¹

Nonetheless, the global business environment has changed, even as business is returning to “normal.” But it is an unprecedented “new normal” that businesses are facing in the wake of the crisis; one characterized by continuing uncertainty, disappearing industry boundaries, and new spheres of economic activity, against a backdrop of ever shortening time horizons. Has the economic crisis been at the root of the changed business context? No doubt, the crisis has had an impact; as to its extent, we really don't know.

Fact is, however, that several new global mega factors appear to be changing how and where we compete in rather fundamental ways. A recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute² identifies four of the mega drivers to be: (1) a shift of economic activity, globally, to emerging markets, and within these, to urban centers; (2) accelerating technological change resulting in an unprecedented scope, scale, and economic impact of technology; (3) an aging human population against a backdrop of falling fertility rates; and (4) greater global flow and connections through trade, movements of capital, people, and information extending to ...