Lords of Strategy

Notes

Chapter 1

1. The actual percentage may be considerably higher but is known only to the mind of God, the sole entity whose omniscience extends to the client lists of all three firms. I tried to get them to submit those lists to a neutral observer to be crosshatched against lists of the largest companies but one balked, apparently after much deliberation. Nevertheless I’m confident in the three-quarters figure, which derives from conversations with senior partners at the firms and other sources. Indeed, nowadays big corporations that don’t use the strategy consulting firms stand out, exceptions that are much talked about among denizens of the industry. Often they attribute the failure to the prejudices of a willful CEO, as at Oracle under ...