For more than forty years, The Boston Consulting Group has been shaping strategic thinking in business. The Boston Consulting Group on Strategyoffers a broad and up-to-date selection of the firm's best ideas on strategy with fresh ideas, insights, and practical lessons for managers, executives, and entrepreneurs in every industry. Here's a sampling of the provocative thinking you'll find inside:

"You have to be the scientist of your own life and be astonished four times:at what is, what always has been, what once was, and what could be."

"The majority of products in most companies are cash traps . . . .[They] are not only worthless, but a perpetual drain on corporate resources."

"Use more debt than your competition or get out of the business."

"When information flows freely, reputation, more than reciprocity,becomes the basis for trust."

"As a strategic weapon, time is the equivalent of money, productivity,quality, even innovation."

"When brands become business systems, brand management becomes far too important to leave to the marketing department."

"The winning organization of the future will look more like a collection ofjazz ensembles than a symphony orchestra."

"Most of our organizations today derive from a model whose original purpose was to control creativity."

"Rather than being an obstacle, uncertainty is the very engine of transformation in a business, a continuous source of new opportunities."

"IP assets lack clear property lines. Every bit of intellectual property you can own comes with connections to other valuable innovations."

With the exception of several articles that appeared first in the Harvard Business Review, most of the pieces in this book are \"Perspectives,\" short essays that were originally published by The Boston Consulting Group for its clients. The ideas they present were almost all developed and tested in the course of working with clients worldwide to improve both position and performance.

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) is regarded as one of the premier management consulting firms. The Financial Times once credited its founder, Bruce Henderson, with inventing the field of corporate strategy. The themes that run through BCG\'s ideas—the importance of competitive advantage, the need to \"break compromises\" and \"de-average\" the numbers, the value of time, and the power of seeing second or third order causes—are more relevant than ever because the need for effective strategy has never been greater. This is a book for managers who want to understand how the business world really works and how to change the course of their companies based on that understanding. '

Michael S. Deimleris a Senior Vice President in the Atlanta office of BCG and the leader of its strategy practice. He holds an MBA from The Wharton School.

The Boston Consulting Group was founded in 1963 and now has sixty-one offices in thirty-six countries.

For more information, please visit: www.bcg.com/bcgonstrategy '

Preface.

Acknowledgments.

PART ONE: The Nature of Business Strategy.

Strategic and Natural Competition,Bruce D. Henderson, 1980.

PART TWO: The Development of Business Strategy.

Foundations.

The Experience Curve Reviewed: History,Bruce D. Henderson, 1973.

The Experience Curve Reviewed: Why Does It Work?Bruce D. Henderson, 1974.

The Experience Curve Reviewed: Price Stability,Bruce D. Henderson, 1974.

The Pricing Paradox,Bruce D. Henderson, 1970.

The Market-Share Paradox,Bruce D. Henderson, 1970.

More Debt or None?Bruce D. Henderson, 1972.

The Rule of Three and Four,Bruce D. Henderson, 1976.

The Product Portfolio,Bruce D. Henderson, 1970.

The Real Objectives,Bruce D. Henderson, 1976.

Milestones.

Life Cycle of the Industry Leader,Bruce D. Henderson, 1972.

The Evils of Average Costing,Richard K. Lochridge, 1975.

Specialization or the Full Product Line,Michael C. Goold, 1979.

Stalemate: The Problem,John S. Clarkeson, 1984.

Business Environments,Richard K. Lochridge, 1981.

Revolution on the Factory Floor,Thomas M. Hout and George Stalk Jr., 1982.

Time—The Next Source of Competitive Advantage,George Stalk Jr., 1988.

Competing on Capabilities: The New Rules of Corporate Strategy,George Stalk Jr., Philip B. Evans, and Lawrence E. Shulman, 1992.

Strategy and the New Economics of Information,Philip B. Evans and Thomas S. Wurster, 1997.

Collaboration Rules,Philip Evans and Bob Wolf, 2005.

PART THREE: The Practice of Business Strategy.

The Customer: Segmentation and Value Creation.

Segmentation and Strategy,Seymour Tilles, 1974.

Strategic Sectors,Bruce D. Henderson, 1975.

Specialization,Richard K. Lochridge, 1981.

Specialization: Cost Reduction or Price Realization,Anthony J. Habgood, 1981.

Segment-of-One® Marketing,Richard Winger and David Edelman, 1989.

Discovering Your Customer,Michael J. Silverstein and Philip Siegel, 1991.

Total Brand Management,David C. Edelman and Michael J. Silverstein, 1993.

Pricing Myopia,Philippe Morel, George Stalk Jr., Peter Stanger, and Peter Wetenhall, 2003.

Trading Up,Michael J. Silverstein and Neil Fiske, 2003 and 2005.

Trading Down: Living Large on $150 a Day,Lucy Brady and Michael J. Silverstein, 2005.

Innovation and Growth.

From the Insight Out,Michael J. Silverstein, 1995.

Capitalizing on Anomalies,Lawrence E. Shulman, 1997.

Breaking Compromises,George Stalk Jr., David K. Pecaut, and Benjamin Burnett, 1997.

A New Product Every Week? Lessons from Magazine Publishing,Gary Reiner and Shikhar Ghosh, 1988.

Innovating for Cash,James P. Andrew and Harold L. Sirkin, 2003.

Acquiring Your Future,Mark Blaxill and Kevin Rivette, 2004.

Deconstruction of Value Chains.

The New Vertical Integration,John R. Frantz and Thomas M. Hout, 1993.

The Deconstruction of Value Chains,Carl W. Stern, 1998.

How Deconstruction Drives De-Averaging,Philip B. Evans, 1998.

Thinking Strategically about E-Commerce,Philip B. Evans and Thomas S. Wurster, 1999.

From “Clicks and Mortar” to “Clicks and Bricks,”Philip B. Evans and Thomas S. Wurster, 2000.

Thermidor: The Internet Revolution and After,Philip B. Evans, 2001.

The Online Employee,Michael S. Deimler and Morten T. Hansen, 2001.

Richer Sourcing,Philip B. Evans and Bob Wolf, 2004.

The Real Contest between America and China,Thomas Hout and Jean Lebreton, 2003.

Performance Measurement.

Profit Center Ethics,Bruce D. Henderson, 1971.

The Story of Joe (A Fable),Bruce D. Henderson, 1977.

Controlling for Growth in a Multidivision Business,Patrick Conley, 1968.

Making Performance Measurements Perform,Robert Malchione, 1991.

Economic Value Added,Eric E. Olsen, 1996.

New Directions in Value Management,Eric E. Olsen, 2002.

Workonomics,Felix Barber, Jeff Kotzen, Eric Olsen, and Rainer Strack, 2002.

Resource Allocation.

Cash Traps,Bruce D. Henderson, 1972.

The Star of the Portfolio,Bruce D. Henderson, 1976.

Anatomy of the Cash Cow,Bruce D. Henderson, 1976.

The Corporate Portfolio,Bruce D. Henderson, 1977.

Renaissance of the Portfolio,Anthony W. Miles, 1986.

Premium Conglomerates,Dieter Heuskel, 1996.

The End of the Public Company—As We Know It,Larry Shulman, 2000.

Advantage, Returns, and Growth—In That Order,Gerry Hansell, 2005.

Organizational Design.

Profit Centers and Decentralized Management,Bruce D. Henderson, 1968.

Unleash Intuition,Richard K. Lochridge, 1984.

Network Organizations,Todd L. Hixon, 1989.

The Myth of the Horizontal Organization,Philippe J. Amouyal and Jill E. Black, 1994.

The Activist Center,Dennis N. Rheault and Simon P. Trussler, 1995.

Shaping Up: The Delayered Look,Ron Nicol, 2004.

A Survivor’s Guide to Organization Redesign,Felix Barber, D. Grant Freeland, and David Brownell, 2002.

Leadership and Change.

Why Change Is So Difficult,Bruce D. Henderson, 1967.

Leadership,Bruce D. Henderson, 1966.

How to Recognize the Need for Change,Carl W. Stern, 1983.

Sustained Success,Alan J. Zakon and Richard K. Lochridge, 1984.

Strategy and Learning,Seymour Tilles, 1985.

Let Middle Managers Manage,Jeanie Daniel Duck, 1991.

Jazz versus Symphony,John S. Clarkeson, 1990.

The Change Curve,Jeanie Daniel Duck, 2001.

Leadership in a Time of Uncertainty,Bolko von Oetinger, 2002.

Leading in Emotional Times,Jeanie Daniel Duck, 2002.

The Forgotten Half of Change,Luc de Brabandere, 2005.

PART FOUR: Business Thinking.

Business Thinking,Bruce D. Henderson, 1977.

Brinkmanship in Business,Bruce D. Henderson, 1967.

Business Chess,Rudyard L. Istvan, 1984.

Probing,Jonathan L. Isaacs, 1985.

Creative Analysis,Anthony W. Miles, 1987.

Make Decisions Like a Fighter Pilot,Mark F. Blaxill and Thomas M. Hout, 1987.

The Seduction of Reductionist Thinking,Jeanie Daniel Duck, 1992.

Choices, Again,Barry Jones and Larry Shulman, 2003.

The Hardball Manifesto,George Stalk Jr. and Rob Lachenauer, 2004.

PART FIVE: Social Commentary.

Failure to Compete,Bruce D. Henderson, 1973.

Inf lation and Investment Return,Bruce D. Henderson, 1974.

Conflicting Tax Objectives,Bruce D. Henderson, 1975.

Dumping,Bruce D. Henderson, 1978.

Adversaries or Partners?Bruce D. Henderson, 1983.

The Promise of Disease Management,Joshua Gray and Peter Lawyer, 1995.

Making SureIndependent Doesn’t MeanIgnorant,Colin Carter and Jay W. Lorsch, 2002.

Index. \n

'