When discussing his work, Bain & Company director Chris Zook sounds like a corporate anthropologist who pries open organizations and scrutinizes their endless shards of data as a way of unearthing solutions to problems that can wipe out entire business sectors.
Zook has twice delved into the complex foundations of thousands of global organizations and emerged each time with insightful best-sellers: Profit From the Core: Growth Strategy in an Era of Turbulence (Harvard Business School Press, February 2001) and Beyond the Core: Expand Your Market Without Abandoning Your Roots (Harvard Business School Press, January 2004).
The first book examines how and why companies can lose their way when they have put in place all of the ingredients necessary for growth. The second book shows how leading companies expand upon a strong core by entering into other businesses. Zook recently completed 110 presentations on his latest book in 20 countries, and believes that a third wave of "core" research — and a third book — are ripe for extraction.
"What struck me wherever I went is that something fundamental has changed in the business world," Zook reports. "The shelf life of the average strategy is shortening."
He compares the magnitude of change around this quickening to the impact of the meteor that struck Earth long ago and accelerated the rate of extinction of animal species. In the face of such change, organizational adaptability becomes paramount.
It sounds like an intriguing idea, but Zook is aware of the dangerous allure of big ideas that lack an empirical foundation. "In business, it's easy to observe anecdotes and then believe that you have observed a law of gravity," he warns. "It's absolutely critical to develop a broad empirical foundation."
Zook and his Bain cohorts are currently studying the performance of hundreds of global companies over several decades to determine if the speed of change is accelerating (so far, he will say only that the results are "interesting"). The second facet of the research will examine case studies — analytical comparisons of companies in similar situations where one enterprise was able to adapt to a changing circumstance while the other company faltered.
The final and most important part of the process is the fieldwork. Once he has identified which companies have grappled with rapid change, Zook conducts in-depth interviews with CEOs and other senior executives to learn how their organizations' narratives intersect with his areas of exploration.
Zook's conclusions leave in their wake an impressive paper trail. His recent media clips amount to a 37-page stack of articles; during the past 12 months, he's been cited in the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, BusinessWeek, Investor's Business Daily, and other top periodicals.
"I've always been interested in the analytical part of the job," he acknowledges. It fascinates Zook to be able to examine highly complex problems — challenges that involve markets, competitors, customers, the environment, business dynamics, human passion, human psychology, organizational structure, and other dimensions of business — and then "break those problems down into logical pieces so that they can be attacked and solved."
Like other professionals at the top of their game, Zook's production blurs the line between work and passion. Whether he was a consultant or not, you get the sense that he would be slaking his curiosity by getting to the heart of big problems. — Eric Krell
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.