The Boston Consulting Group on Strategy

This remarkable anthology of articles on strategy and management is an essential companion for executives facing the need to rethink their businesses. Whether the task is to defeat new or entrenched competitors, it is often necessary to go back to the basics and to consider radical departures. The Boston Consulting Group on Strategy will help readers do both because it contains seminal concepts about reducing costs and gaining market share, as well as new thinking on the power of networks, pricing and segmentation, and the impact of ever cheaper communications and distribution.

With the exception of several articles that appeared first in the Harvard Business Review, most of the pieces in this book are "Perspectives," short essays that were originally published by The Boston Consulting Group for its clients. The ideas they present were almost all developed and tested in the course of working with clients worldwide to improve both position and performance.

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) is regarded as one of the premier management consulting firms. The Financial Times once credited its founder, Bruce Henderson, with inventing the field of corporate strategy. The themes that run through BCG's ideas—the importance of competitive advantage, the need to "break compromises" and "de-average" the numbers, the value of time, and the power of seeing second or third order causes—are more relevant than ever because the need for effective strategy has never been greater. This is a book for managers who want to understand how the business world really works and how to change the course of their companies based on that understanding.