BCG, Bain, McKinsey and Strategic Thinking

It's hard to believe there was a time when business strategy was more a theory than a given. That time, of course, is long gone. But just how did we get from there to here? Walter Kiechel III, the former editorial director of Harvard Business Publishing and former managing editor at Fortune, recounts the birth and evolution of strategy in his latest book The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World . In doing so, he identifies four men who more or less invented it—Bruce Hendersen, founder of The Boston Consulting Group; Bill Bain, creator of Bain & Company; Fred Gluck, longtime managing director of McKinsey & Company, and Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter. In this meticulously reported and entertaining book, Kiechel offers an insider's account of how the profession's most influential strategy firms came to be.

Consulting: For those of us that follow the consulting profession, I must say that you've written a great book that reads almost like a juicy tell all. Kiechel: [Laughing] Well, I never thought of it that way, but I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Consulting: What was the inspiration for writing a book about strategy? Kiechel: As a journalist, I've always thought the most interesting stories were the ones that were not covered sufficiently in proportion to their importance. In thinking about this over the last several years, it struck me that the development of modern strategy is one of those subjects. It's really important and has been changing the way companies thought about how they do business, and the corporate landscape in general. I had never seen a book about strategy and its development in business.