If you are a consulting geek, or like to read business history, The Lords of Strategy (affiliate link) is a fascinating and easy read. Helps you understand the economic, regulatory, and business trends that gave rise to the Big 3 consulting firms (McKinsey, BCG, Bain). Also, great trivia story about how the BCG “blue team” became Bain & Company. In the mid 1960s, Bruce Henderson, founder of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), was reading a lot of books on paleoanthropology (caveman competition stuff), and decided to run an experiment on his own company. He divided the company into three teams (red, blue, and green mini-firms) and had them compete with each other. It worked (a little too) well. The blue team did the best. This team was led by Bill Bain and Patrick Graham, who would 3 years later leave BCG and form a new company, the eponymous Bain and Company.
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I just finished listening to it last year, and I know I missed a lot by not being able to take notes.
If you want to understand the history of the ‘business of strategy’, this is the go-to reference. Strategy is big business, and I had no idea these concepts and ideas started back in the 1960s (or the timing of when strategy started gaining mindshare with big-company CEOs).
Now, I need to just read it so that I can capture what I missed on the audio version.
Awesome. Yes, super enjoying this book too.
Hey, we finally have a name and a face to put with these terrific insights! That’s great! Congratulations on the site redesign.
Thanks for reading.
Apologies if off topic, but concur with John’s comment above. Again, great site, great insights.
Thanks for reading all these years. Got more planned later in the year – should be good fun.
Amazing work! Thank you for sharing your knowledge and perspectives! I always learn so much. Gabriel, Brazil.
Thanks for reading. Have a lot of good things planned for this year, thanks for being a part of it.
Great work John is doing here. Well done!
Thanks for reading.
Going through this book now, correct it’s totally interesting!