How Can a Firm Beat The Global Odds?

When Paul Laudicina, Managing Partner and Chairman of the Board at A.T. Kearney, wrote World Out of Balance in 2005, things were very much still in balance. But Laudicina saw it differently and argued that the course we were on was unsustainable. As it turns out, Laudicina foreshadowed everything from the global economic meltdown to the Arab Spring. "It's looking at current developments and playing them out over 10 or 15 years, and trying to fathom what the world will look like. When I did that, it was pretty clear to me that it was unsustainable." Laudicina is back at it with Beating the Global Odds , a book that examines how we got to this point and takes a closer look at how some companies—including his own firm—managed to find success in extremely difficult economic times.

Consulting: Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of this book?

Laudicina: When I wrote World Out of Balance in 2005 things were going, by all regards, very well. But I wrote that it wasn't sustainable. And when I took over A.T. Kearney in 2006, the world was still on a high even though A.T. Kearney was the proverbial Phoenix at that point having been through the trauma of living the last few difficult years as a subsidiary of EDS. A lot of folks didn't give us very good odds, but a bunch of us decided to re-invest and restart the firm.