Imagine, if you can, the world of business - without corporate strategy. Remarkably, fifty years ago that's the way it was. Businesses made plans, certainly, but without understanding the underlying dynamics of competition, costs, and customers. It was like trying to design a large-scale engineering project without knowing the laws of physics. But in the 1960s, four mavericks and their posses instigated a profound shift in thinking that turbocharged business as never before, with implications far beyond what even they imagined. In The Lords of Strategy, renowned business journalist and editor Walter Kiechel tells, for the first time, the story of the four men who invented corporate strategy as we know it and set in motion the modern, multibillion-dollar consulting industry:- Bruce Henderson, founder of Boston Consulting Group - Bill Bain, creator of Bain & Company - Fred Gluck, longtime Managing Director of McKinsey & Company -Michael Porter, Harvard Business School professorProviding a window into how to think about strategy today, Kiechel tells their story with novelistic flair. At times inspiring, at times nearly terrifying, this book is a revealing account of how these iconoclasts and the organizations they led revolutionized the way we think about business, changed the very soul of the corporation, and transformed the way we work.

如果你能想象一下，商业世界--没有公司战略。值得注意的是，五十年前就是这样的。企业当然会制定计划，但却不了解竞争、成本和客户的基本动态。这就像在不了解物理规律的情况下试图设计一个大型工程项目。但是，在20世纪60年代，四个特立独行的人和他们的手下引发了一场深刻的思维转变，使企业的发展得到了前所未有的推动，其影响甚至远远超出了他们的想象。在《战略领主》中，著名商业记者和编辑沃尔特-基歇尔首次讲述了这四个人的故事，他们发明了我们所熟知的企业战略，并启动了现代价值数十亿美元的咨询行业：--布鲁斯-亨德森，波士顿咨询集团的创始人--比尔-贝恩，贝恩公司的创始人--弗雷德-格鲁克，麦肯锡公司的长期常务董事--迈克尔-波特，哈佛商学院的教授，为今天如何思考战略提供了一个窗口，基歇尔以新颖的手法讲述了他们的故事。本书时而鼓舞人心，时而令人恐惧，揭示了这些标志性人物和他们领导的组织如何彻底改变了我们思考商业的方式，改变了公司的灵魂，并改变了我们的工作方式。