Lords of Strategy

1.

Strategy as a Caseto Be Cracked

ACCORDING TO THE STORY, Peter Drucker once remarked that he had “invented management.” But how can that be, his listener responded, given that people had been running organizations for centuries, millennia? True, the sage replied, but when he first went to study the subject in the 1930s and 1940s, he could find only two or three books describing the functions he came to group under that rubric. By naming them management, pulling them together with that term, he gave those practicing the art a new way of understanding what they were doing. And a new way of studying and improving their practice.

The argument of this book is that precisely the same thing went on with the invention of corporate strategy, except ...