文档介绍：25814-.(009-020)S1/Chapter1 8/7/00 5:13 PM Page 9
Thinking
strategically
pany should make sure that it is the best possible owner of each of
its business units—not simply hold on to units that are strong in themselves.
In the late 1970s, Fred Gluck led an effort to revitalize McKinsey’s thinking
on strategy while, in parallel, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman were leading a
similar effort to reinvent the Firm’s thinking anization. The first published
product of Gluck’s strategy initiative was a 1978 staff paper, “The evolution of
strategic management.”
The ostensible purpose of Gluck’s article was to throw light on the then-popular
but ill-defined term “strategic management,” using data from a recent McKinsey
study of formal strategic planning in corporations. The authors concluded that
such planning routinely evolves through four distinct phases of development,
rising in sophistication from simple year-to-year budgeting to strategic manage-
ment, in which strategic planning and everyday management are inextricably
intertwined.
But the power of the es from the authors’ insights into the true nature
of strategy and what constitutes high-quality strategic thinking. The article is
also noteworthy for setting forth McKinsey’s original definition of strategy as
“an integrated set of actions designed to create a sustainable advantage over
This article can be found on our Web site at ategy/.
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10 FOUNDATIONS
competitors” and includes a description of the well-known “nine-box” matrix
that formed the basis of McKinsey’s approach to business portfolio analysis.
Ten years later, a team from the Firm’s Australian office took portfolio analysis a
step further. Rather than basing portfolio strategy only on metrics of a business
unit’s absolute attractiveness, as suggested by the nine-box matrix, John Stuckey
and Ken McLeod mended adding a key new decision v