Strategy That Works

APPENDIX B

The Capable Company Research Project

This book is an effort to document how companies have narrowed the gap between strategy and execution in the face of competitive pressure and their own internal complacency. We began with a question: If a winning capabilities system is critical to capturing value, how do companies develop it, make use of it, and keep it alive?

There was little published research to work with. While writers like C. K. Prahalad, Gary Hamel, David Teece, Ikujiro Nonaka, Hirotaka Takeuchi, and Alfred D. Chandler had all marshaled evidence to show that distinctive capabilities were critically important, they had less to say about how companies went about developing them.¹

We started with three simple hypotheses: First, ...