War is not a pathology,” says Philip Bobbitt. “War is a natural condition of the state.” In his groundbreaking book The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) ...

Since the mid-1990s, the source of competitive advantage has been shifting. Leading companies used to be diverse conglomerates that based their competitive strategy on assets, positions, and economies ...

How does a company cope with change? It’s a question that looms large for many executives who are struggling to keep up with the breakneck pace of business. Those who fail to answer it may face loss ...

Everybody knows that big corporations, by nature, maneuver like battleships. Held back by their own inertia and current business strategies, they cannot turn quickly when the competitive environment ...

Over the last few years, companies in a wide variety of industries have created increasingly senior executive positions in supply chain management. Lucent Technologies Inc., the ChevronTexaco ...

In the beginning, it was cultural and managerial chaos. When Chinese computer company Lenovo dispatched a team to New York in 2004 to discuss acquiring the personal computer division of IBM, only one ...

The word philosopher is a pejorative in Larry Bossidy’s lexicon. Philosophers, he says, are people “who are good strategists, but don’t have the capability to translate that strategy into action.” And ...

A version of this article appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of strategy+business. Leaders today are well aware that their organization’s culture is an asset that must be managed with purpose and care.

A version of this article appeared in the Autumn 2016 issue of strategy+business. Most companies have leaders with the strong operational skills needed to maintain the status quo. But they face a ...

Two companies; same crisis; vastly different responses and outcomes. A Nordic telecommunications company and its primary competitor, another European telecom manufacturer, both depended on the same ...

A visitor traveling from Boston to Jay Forrester’s home in the Concord woods must drive by Walden Pond, where the most influential iconoclast of American literature spent an insightful couple of years ...

It was Confucius who said that “life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” I’m going to explain why achieving simplicity matters, and how organizing strategy around the number six ...