Thank You For Disrupting

PART TWODISRUPTIVE BUSINESS THINKING

I have often wondered how Chinese businessmen, now in their sixties and brought up outside the market economy, learned to run companies. How did they understand the business world? By devouring, as we've seen, American books. They knew how to transport academic thought into real life. Business literature opened the eyes of Zhang Ruimin and Jack Ma, whose parents had spent a lifetime ignoring everything related to free enterprise.

U.S. business literature is a discipline in itself, a subset of the social sciences, a specific area of thought from the country with the largest number of major companies in the world. Authors have forged central ideas. Concepts such as core competencies, quality circles, reengineering, portfolio management, value migration, sustainable competitive advantage, and also contingency planning, knowledge workers, the balanced scorecard, the value chain—the list is quite long. Their personal theories shed new light on what goes on in the world of business. They reveal new trends and allow readers to see companies' successes or failures through a new prism.

Among the best known of these authors are Peter Drucker, Gary Hamel, Michael Hammer, Charles Handy, Michael Porter, Tom Peters, and Jim Collins. I've met two of them, Gary Hamel and Tom Peters. Gary Hamel became world-famous when he published Leading the Revolution and he was the keynote speaker of a symposium on breakthrough strategies we organized with the Conference ...