The lords of strategy : the secret intellectual history of the new corporate world / Walter Kiechel III.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Strategy as a case to be cracked -- Bruce Henderson defines the subject -- The experience curve delivers a shock -- Loading the matrix -- What Bill Bain wanted -- Waking up McKinsey -- Michael Porter encounters the surreal -- The human stain -- The paradigm that failed? -- Struggling to make something actually happen -- Breaking the world into finer pieces -- The wizards of finance reveal strategy's true purpose -- How competencies came to be core -- The revolution conquers the world -- Three versions of strategy as people -- And where was strategy when the global financial system collapsed?.

Journalist and editor Walter Kiechel recounts the birth and evolution of strategy, arguably the most influential business paradigm of the past half century and the trials and triumphs of the disruptors who invented it.