Seduced Once More by the Myth of Corporate Persistence
You could hear the disappointment in my friend’s voice. “I had a lot of respect for Toyota,” she observed. More than most onlookers she knew the literature on its vaunted system of continuous process...
View ArticlePass the Word–or Else
As it turns out, Europeans got a bit of a head start having their defective Toyotas fixed. Yoshimi Inaba, head of the company’s North American operations, admitted to a congressional committee last...
View ArticleStrategy on the Morph
In 1966 Time magazine published a cover article posing the question, “Is God Dead?” Asked about the possibility, former President Eisenhower reportedly responded, “That’s funny. I was just talking...
View ArticleStrategy Looks at Healthcare Reform
Last time he was running for President, the time before this time, Mitt Romney gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal that ran under the title, “Consultant in Chief.” Romney had of course been a...
View ArticleStrategy’s Case Against Specialization
The poet William DeWitt Snodgrass died last year, an event little remarked on in the strategy community. This is probably because in fifty years of writing and teaching, Snodgrass evinced absolutely no...
View ArticleStrategy By Any Other Name
A friend who books speakers for business events tells me strategy experts aren’t much in demand these days; indeed, they haven’t been for years. (Except in Japan.) Until recently audiences still sought...
View ArticleC.K. Prahalad and Strategy as Boundaryless Aspiration
C.K. Prahalad manifestly qualified as a High Lord of Strategy, Second Generation. News of his death saddened me, and set me to reflecting on the themes running through his work over four decades. This...
View ArticleThe Strategy Imperative Not to Hire Anybody
My lunch companion arrived fifteen minutes late. “My phone has begun to ring again,” he explained, “which is a good sign for the economy.” Once a big-league strategy consultant, he now has a firm that...
View ArticleThe State of Strategy Consulting, 2011
Like Satan in the book of Job, I’ve been going to and fro in the earth over the past few months, in my case talking to corporate executives, consultants and former consultants. Among my questions to...
View ArticleThe Tempting of Rajat Gupta
As anyone with the slightest interest in the consulting business knows by now, the SEC has brought civil charges against Rajat Gupta in the Galleon insider-trading case. What makes the matter...
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