Lords of Strategy

Finished this book a couple of days ago. My most useful takeaway is that I had not taken the advice of nearly everyone to write a book on NaviMap. Here is the passage from the book which had vindicated my judgement. Really, I am not willing to think too highly of myself. I quote from the book.


To become an author, one didn’t even necessarily need to know how to write. For a person with the right credentials and an intriguing idea to push, editorial help was readily available. Alan Webber, the leading staff editor at HBR during this period, later described how the process worked: “The dirty little secret of the Harvard Business Review is that most of the great articles that we published when I was the editor weren’t exactly written by people whose names were on the byline. And that’s not to say they weren’t the author. But they didn’t write them. If you go talk to the professors at the Harvard Business School and you ask them to write an article, you very quickly discover they can’t write a lick. In order to get a very advanced degree, you have to be taught how not to write very, very well. Now, what they can do is talk.


Kiechel, Walter (2010-03-03). Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World (p. 244). Harvard Business Press. Kindle Edition. 

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

http://www.amazon.com/Lords-Strategy-Int...

Imagine, if you can, the world of business - without corporate strategy. Remarkably, fifty years ago that's the way it was. Businesses made plans, certainly, but without understanding the underlying dynamics of competition, costs, and customers. It was like trying to design a large...