Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Brief article - Book review

Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World. By Walter Kiechel 3d. Harvard Business School Press, 320 pages. $26.95.

Perhaps it's a bit presumptuous for Walter Kiechel, long a premier business journalist and former managing editor of Fortune, to call this history "secret." The implication is that he alone has stumbled on the candle that illuminates a murky path--or that readers can get intriguing inside information.

What Kiechel concludes, after what he says was several years of research and more than 100 interviews, is that beginning in the 1960s, the notion of corporate strategy--and who executed it best--reconstituted major corporations into entities that competed on the basis of ideas.

As that evolved, four major figures shaped this revolution: Bruce Henderson, founder of Boston Consulting Group, the first strategy-consulting firm; Bill Bain, Bain Consulting's founder; Fred Gluck, who introduced...