The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs.

• Author: Sweeney, Paul
• Position: Book review

By Cynthia A. Montgomery

HarperCollins, 189 pages, $27.99

Toward the end of her fascinating book, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs, author Cynthia A. Montgomery likens the late Steve Jobs's makeover of his high-technology company to the ancient Greek myth of the ship of Theseus.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

After slaying the Minotaur--a monster that was half man, half bull--the hero Theseus sailed home to Athens from the island of Crete in a rotting ship. As each plank decayed, it was replaced by new and stronger timber, until every plank in the ship had been changed. So the question posed was: "Is it still the same ship?

"It's a paradox," Montgomery writes, "that Plutarch called 'the logical question of things that grow.'"

So it was at Apple Inc. With the 2001 introduction of the iPod and a deal struck with iTunes, Jobs's company revolutionized the music industry. By 2009, Apple was selling 60 million iPods a year,

Meanwhile, in 2007, the company rolled out the 'Phone, the credit card-sized device that provided wireless telephone and Internet access, plus a repository for music and photographs.

Like Theseus's ship, Apple was rebuilding itself plank by plank. In order to reinvent itself, Apple shed outmoded and unprofitable ventures, becoming the agent of its own "creative destruction," the famous phrase coined by noted economist Joseph Schumpeter. Yet Jobs himself insisted that the company's transformation, like that of Theseus's ship, could never have occurred without Apple's "incredible technology base, legendary ease of use and awesome design."

Jobs's stunning turnaround of Apple is just one of several illustrative case studies--furniture maker IKEA Systems B.V., fashion designer Gucci (PPR Luxury Group), and building products company Masco Corp. are others--that Montgomery, the Timken professor of business administration and an expert on entrepreneurship and strategy at the Harvard Business School, relies upon to teach key business lessons.

At Gucci, years of family infighting, extravagant spending and shoddy management by the Gucci family resulted in some $102 million worth of losses from 1991 to 1993. But how did turnaround specialist Domenico De Sole right the...