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 Opening Strategy
Professional Strategists and Practice
Change, 1960 to Today

Richard Whittington

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1
 Contents

List of Figures xiii

List of Tables xv
List of Abbreviations xvii

1. Opening Strategy: Practices and Professionals 1

2. Making Strategy: Theory and Practice 23

3. Corporate Strategists: Surviving the ‘Fall’ 58

4. Strategy Consultants: Knowledgeable Professionals 90

5. Strategic Planning: Choice and Competition 127

6. Strategic Management: Change and Implementation 171

7. Open Strategy: Transparency and Inclusion 215

8. Changing Strategy—for the Better 254

Appendix: Sources and Methods 275

Bibliography 285
Index 297

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 1

Opening Strategy
Practices and Professionals

Strategy was once the stuff of secrets. In 1970, Fred Borch, chief executive of
General Electric, then the largest industrial conglomerate in the world, was
happy to explain how he ‘keeps a secret plan locked tightly in his desk. Borch
drew the plan privately, without consulting even his closest colleagues, when
he took the reins seven years ago . . . Borch guards his plan like Cerberus at the
gates of hell’.1 There is exaggeration here, but the contrast with today’s claims
of strategic openness is strong. Jim Whitehurst, chief executive officer (CEO) of
leading software company Red Hat, professes a ‘meritocracy of ideas’, where
strategies can come from any level and any part of the organization. In White-
hurst’s twenty-first-century Red Hat, strategizing has apparently become
‘a series of concentric circles like ripples on a lake that eventually touched
everyone. But instead of ripples that moved only outward . . . , they continued
back and forth as they carried information and ideas throughout the company’.2
The general trajectory from the secretiveness of Fred Borch half a century

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ago to the openness of Jim Whitehurst today is the core theme of this book.
Over time, the practices of strategy are becoming increasingly open—inclusive
in terms of participants, transparent with regard to stakeholders. More people

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are involved in strategy-making, and more is revealed. Strategy jams over
social media, strategy blogging, strategy wikis, strategy townhalls, and exter-
nal strategy presentations are now ordinary parts of organizational life.
This opening of strategy is a remarkable change for theory as well as prac-
tice. After all, for the founding theorist of the strategy discipline, Alfred
Chandler (1962), objectivity and control could only be achieved by reserving
strategy for a top management elite, clearly detached from the self-interested
managers in the businesses. For Chandler, giving middle managers a voice in
strategy only encourages the pursuit of myopic agendas. According to the
theoretical orthodoxy of the resource-based view, protecting unique resources
 Opening Strategy

from imitation is basic to competitive advantage (Barney, 2001): openness just

gives rivals the chance to steal a competitive march. In this view, opacity
trumps transparency. One way or another, it is far from obvious why strategy
should become more and more widely shared.
My aim, then, is to tell the story of how more open strategy practices have
been created over time and to honour the work of the innovative professionals
responsible for them. Step by step—from the primitive strategic planning of
the 1960s, to the strategic management of the 1980s, and now to more self-
conscious experiments in ‘open strategy’ (Hautz et al., 2017)—strategists have
transformed the process of strategy-making. The changes are ambivalent,
uneven, and reversible, but in the round strategy is less and less a private
affair. Strategy no longer sits in the heads of owners and chief executives,
unarticulated and safe from challenge. Managers and employees, shareholders
and regulators, consumers and suppliers increasingly have both the means
and the expectation to be informed and even consulted about the strategies of
large organizations. Given the heft of contemporary corporations—just think
Alphabet or Alibaba—this opening of strategy promises an important kind of
revolution, little remarked and not sufficiently sung.
To recognize how far strategy-making has changed, it helps to take a long-
run view: in the midst of things, it is hard to appreciate changes whose very
success renders them commonplace. The broad shift to openness is better
understood by comparing with the taken-for-granted of decades ago. This
book therefore takes as its baseline the years around 1960, a period when
issues of strategic choice and competition were gaining widespread attention
for the first time, introducing a significant number of people to new kinds of
formal roles in strategy. Six decades puts contrasts and continuities in proper
perspective.
But this long-run view should not obscure the details. The opening of

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strategy is to some degree the product of large exogenous forces originating
from outside the immediate world of strategy—organizational forces such as
the changing nature of business, cultural forces such as the growth of man-

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agerial education, and technological forces such as computerization and the
spread of the internet. These kinds of forces will be elaborated on later in the
chapter. However, successive practice innovations, and the overall trajectory
towards greater openness, are more than the simple product of exogenous
forces. Transforming forces into practice requires creativity and entrepreneur-
ship by individual strategists working in particular firms. Broad trends are
realized in the specifics of local action.
Thus my account will also highlight the sheer effort involved in bringing
about practice change in strategy. While chief executives get the headlines, it
is the hard, detailed work of generations of strategy consultants and corporate
strategy staffs that has gradually and sometimes inadvertently brought more

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 Opening Strategy: Practices and Professionals

and more people into the strategy process. It is predominantly these specialists
who have had the space and incentives to introduce, routinize, and promul-
gate new practices over time. Their efforts deserve the telling. Incidents such
as the defeat of McKinsey’s ‘lions’ by a brilliant Japanese nuclear physicist, or
the fight-back of General Electric’s planning chief against shifts in managerial
fashion, can illuminate important features of the general process of practice
change. We can learn too from the psychedelic drug users at the Stanford
Research Institute (SRI); from Shell’s adept of Eastern mysticism, Pierre Wack;
and from perhaps the world’s most famous strategic planner, Mary Cunning-
ham at Bendix (she married him). It is the work of concrete individuals in
decisive moments of change that underpins the broad trends of this book:
from strategic planning, to strategic management, and now to open strategy.
At the centre of this book, therefore, will be those strategy professionals—
strategy consultants, corporate strategists, and the like—who have developed
the practices that routinely guide the strategy-making of many of the world’s
largest corporations.3 I shall show how consultants at firms like the Boston
Consulting Group (BCG) and McKinsey & Co., and corporate strategists in
companies such as General Electric and Shell, have brought about pervasive
change in strategy. While they have been helped and sometimes inspired by
influential academics from such universities as Harvard and Michigan, it is
these professionals from the world of practice that are at the centre of my
story. Together, these strategy professionals have made strategy something
that can be debated and communicated more and more widely in society.
Strategy has become an object of ordinary discussion. Their achievements are
not just of historical note, however. As we know more about the successes of
earlier generations, so we can understand better the prospects for innovators
today. Historical patterns ground theoretical generalization (Burgelman,
2011). The past can inform the present.

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Professionals: Strategy with a Capital S

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This book broadly follows Mintzberg (1994: 32) in focusing on those whose
primary responsibility is not day-to-day operations but the overall futures
of their employing organizations.4 This includes in-house corporate strat-
egists, going under a range of titles; it also includes external strategy consult-
ants, for whom the employers are their clients. For corporate strategists and
strategy consultants, primary responsibility means that strategy is the core of
their job: unlike other managers, they are more or less full-time strategists.
Thus strategy is a kind of work, aimed at the future of whole organizations,
or business units within them. What is exactly done as ‘strategy’ varies
over time—early on, strategic planning was mostly about dealing with

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competitors; more recently, open strategy is as much about embracing

stakeholders. But the essence of strategy work remains the same, concerned
with the organization’s overall future.
The strategy consultants and corporate strategists doing this work form the
heart of a kind of ‘profession’—Strategy with a capital S. This capitalization of
Strategy refers to strategy professionals as an occupational group, rather than the
strategy of any particular organization. In this sense, Strategy is a professional
‘field’, like accounting or journalism.5 Thus Strategy describes the class of strat-
egy consultants, corporate strategists, and—to an extent—strategy academics for
whom strategy is central to their professional working lives. Strategy consultants
and corporate strategists are specialists, bound together by the shared practices of
their profession—techniques such as scenario analysis, procedures such as
annual planning cycles, and routines such as strategy retreats. These practices
are authoritative and continuous, yet at the same time the subject of interpret-
ation and innovation. As they engage with Strategy’s practices, professionals
know that their work is, in some significant sense, ‘strategic’.
To call Strategy a profession may seem provocative, but it does assert a
fundamental point. Strategy may not have high-status professional bodies,
or watchful regulatory institutions, or long histories of distinguished public
servants, all characteristics of many other professions. But for sociologists, it is
what people do that defines professionalism. This is not just a matter of full-
time engagement. Ultimately, Strategy is professional because of the nature of
the work: strategists are like other professionals in that they deal with prob-
lems of risk and uncertainty, and that they determine appropriate actions
through a combination of personal discretion and shared practices (Evetts,
2003). Strategists address unknowable futures. They choose techniques, select
data for analysis, and interpret results. In the uncertainty of its problems and
the discretionary nature of its choices, Strategy is no different to established

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professions such as medicine and law, looser ones like journalism and politics,
or newer ones like project management and public relations. For strategists, it
is their work, rather than the status of their professional bodies, the extent of

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formal regulation, or distinction of their leaders that defines them as profes-
sionals. To deny the professional character of Strategy is to ignore the risk,
uncertainty, discretion, and shared practices that are central to what strategy
professionals do.
Even so, paying attention to these strategy professionals is to challenge
today’s conventional wisdom. Formal strategy and full-time strategists have
fallen out of fashion. Strategic planning has become a particular bugbear. The
great organization theorist James March (2006) invokes the failures of the
Soviet Union to warn that the large commitments made through rational
strategic planning can lead to disproportionately large catastrophes: recall
the famines in the Ukraine or the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. In this view,

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 Opening Strategy: Practices and Professionals

small experiments, local initiatives, and inspired improvisations are the more
effective means of coping with complexity and change. The new mantra is
that strategy should emerge from the bottom up, rather than be designed from
the top (Chia and Holt, 2009). Scorn for strategic planning has become a
cliché. For Gary Hamel and C.K. Pralahad (1996: 281), strategy is often just a
‘pedantic planning ritual’. Henry Mintzberg (1994) evoked Gibbon’s classic
account of Roman imperial decay in his influential book The Rise and Fall of
Strategic Planning. The critics are relentless to this day. Roger Martin (2014),
former co-head of Monitor Consulting and later dean of the Rotman School
of Management, calls strategic planning ‘the big lie’. Strategy consultants
too have been denounced as ‘witchdoctors’ (Micklethwait and Wooldridge,
1996). Harvard Business School professor and former BCG consultant Clay
Christensen (Christensen et al., 2013) declares that traditional strategy
consulting is undergoing fundamental disruption, outmoded in a world of
sophisticated clients. Whether in-house corporate strategists or external strat-
egy consultants, professional strategists appear in danger of irrelevance.
Yet, in one form or another, the Strategy profession remains a substantial
and vibrant one. About half of Standard & Poor’s 500 firms have chief strategy
officers (CSOs) (Menz and Scheef, 2014), a proportion that rose during the first
decade of this century. Organizations today that employ CSOs range from
Hewlett-Packard, PepsiCo, and Yamaha to the Anne Arundel Medical Center
and the Girl Scouts of the USA.6 On average, such CSOs have six or seven
professionals reporting directly to them—and there may be more strategy staff
working lower down the organization.7 At the same time, the worldwide
market for strategy consultants was estimated at $29 billion in 2015.8 The
top three strategy consulting firms—Bain, BCG, and McKinsey—together
employed about 35,000 staff in 2017, though now many of them are involved
in a range of services. These three companies occupy the second, third, and

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fourth positions in the list of most desirable firms to work for among MBAs
(Alphabet takes the top slot).9 As described in Chapters 3 and 4, some con-
sultants switch to CSO roles and from there go on to the highest echelons of

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corporate leadership.
For ambitious young managers, therefore, the Strategy profession is a good
place to start. Some of the readers of this book—I hope—will be exactly such
ambitious managers, but others will be teaching them or working with them.
If organizations continue to invest in deliberate strategy, and if professionals
still make careers in it, then the forms Strategy takes and the way it changes are
surely things we need to understand. The promise of this book is to take these
professionals and their practices seriously. We need more than cheap jibes
against consultants and tired clichés about planning.
Calling Strategy a profession is therefore to recognize the discretionary
nature of an important kind of work. But the term has at least three useful

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 Opening Strategy

effects besides. First, it turns attention to questions of professional responsibility:

in terms of influence, Strategy’s professionals can be on a par with accountants
and lawyers at least. McKinsey alone advises ninety of the world’s top one
hundred corporations (not to mention forty-five national governments).10
Influencing the strategic decisions of such powerful organizations, Strategy’s
practices have a long reach. As when the spread of portfolio matrix practices
promoted excessive conglomerate diversification in 1970s American industry
(Hayes and Abernathy, 1980), or when excitement over ‘new economy’ strat-
egies contributed to the dot-com bust at the beginning of this century
(Whittington et al., 2003), or when contemporary notions of ‘disruptive innov-
ation’ become fashionable cover for devastating economic change (Lepore,
2014), Strategy’s practices can have repercussions that resonate throughout
whole societies—for better or for worse. For professionals, these repercussions
should matter. Professions like medicine, law, and even accounting accept the
need to balance private and social interests. Their professional bodies exercise a
kind of quality control on behalf of the community at large. They measure their
practices against a vocational ethic, whether health, justice, or accuracy. Strat-
egy professionals are powerful too. Giving Strategy the label of profession
exposes its wider responsibilities.
Second, to insist on Strategy’s professional character is to raise some
awkward questions. Given Strategy professionals’ scope for discretionary
judgement, their susceptibility to doubtful new practices, and their closeness
to centres of vast economic power, it is natural to ask why, by comparison
with other professions, regulations are so absent and professional bodies so
weak. The main professional society in the United States, the Strategic Lead-
ership Forum, went bankrupt in 1998; the Strategic Planning Society in the
United Kingdom is defunct; and the main international body, the Strategic
Management Society, has fallen almost wholly into the hands of academics.11

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From a sociological perspective, the absence of strong professional bodies and
regulation should not so much disbar analysis of Strategy’s professional status
as spur it on. In terms of its weakness in formal structures, Strategy is an

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outlier. Given its influence, the profession deserves more oversight.
The third effect of recognizing Strategy as a profession is how it allows us to
draw from the wider sociology of professions, not only to define relative
weaknesses but also to identify consequential tendencies and characteristics.
I have already touched on the organizational, cultural, and technological
forces that sociologists recognize as driving professional change generally
and which are relevant to Strategy as well. Here though, I shall introduce
two professional characteristics that are particularly pronounced in Strategy
and which have implications both for change in Strategy’s practices and for
the work required to produce them. These key characteristics for Strategy are
its precariousness and its permeability.

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 Opening Strategy: Practices and Professionals

Precarious work—insecure employment—is becoming a common feature of

contemporary economies (Kalleberg, 2009). Strategy shares this insecurity.
While conditions are typically far superior to those of the Uber taxi-drivers
or freelance journalists ordinarily included in the analysis of precarious work,
strategy professionals too are vulnerable to similar pressures. Strategists serve
at the whim of their clients or chief executives. As we shall see in Chapters 3
and 4 especially, contracts and tenures are often short. This is consequential.
Strategy’s precarious nature drives a good deal of its creativity and entrepre-
neurship. Consulting firms fold, CSOs move on, practices get tired. In this
precarious world, Strategy’s internal dynamic is to create new strategy prac-
tices that give its professionals new claims to existence.
Precariousness has also supported a tendency towards openness around
strategy. First, to create a market for their services, consultants had to make
strategy a subject of more open discussion. As I shall show, strategy’s transi-
tion into the wider sphere was in large part the achievement of Bruce Hender-
son’s publicity efforts at BCG in the 1960s.12 Next, to escape the treadmill of
short analytical projects, consultants had to go beyond the managerial elites
of strategy formulation to include the mid-level employees required for long-
term strategy implementation. The commercial value of such deeper engage-
ment was the insight that drove Bill Bain’s consulting firm in the 1970s and
1980s.13 Today, responding to new demands for strategic information, strat-
egists make a virtue of inclusion and transparency. This embrace of openness
is Jim Whitehurst’s message from Red Hat.14 In other words, at each stage,
incremental steps towards greater openness have offered solutions to the
profession’s structural precariousness: initially, as a response to strategy con-
sultants’ marginal position with regard to corporate decision-makers; later, to
provide longer projects than those of analytical strategy formulation; and
now, to accommodate the growing appetite and skills of those traditionally

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outside the Strategy profession.
It is Strategy’s second professional characteristic, its permeability, that
particularly dictates the manner by with which new strategy practices are

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made and old practices fade. Professional groups vary in the extent of ‘social
closure’, how far they exercise control over who can practice and the practices
they use (Malhotra and Morris, 2009). Traditional professions like medicine,
law, or accounting are relatively impermeable, with extensive state and profes-
sional regulation defining required qualifications and legitimate practices. Only
the select can work, and some practices are licensed while others are inadmis-
sible. Heterodox practitioners are closed out. In such impermeable professions,
change can be decisive and complete. Appropriate practices are strictly defined
by standards and regulation (Whittington and Anderson, 2019).
Strategy, though, is relatively permeable as a profession, with low social
closure. It is a profession like journalism or politics. No qualifications are

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necessary for entry, and practitioners can use whatever tools seem to work.
Old practices such as SWOT analysis (see Chapter 2), dreamt up in the early
1960s, can persist alongside the latest ideas of digital disruption, big data, and
business modelling. At the same time, intellectual property rights have little
purchase. New practices are subject to competitive proliferation: as we shall
see, consultants could peddle three different versions of corporate portfolio
analysis to General Electric simultaneously. Strategy’s permeability means
that it is hard to exclude upstarts, shut down the outdated, or freeze out
copycats. Change is repetitive and raggedy. Whereas in impermeable profes-
sions like medicine or accounting, users of dated practices can be forced out by
professional sanctions, in a permeable profession like strategy, old-fashioned
practices tend to hang around. If Strategy were a more strongly regulated
profession, there would be no need for its leaders still to be denouncing
strategic planning two decades after its original obituaries (Martin, 2014). In
a profession like Strategy, introducing new practices and displacing the old are
long and laborious processes.
My thesis in this book, then, is that since the mid-twentieth century
strategy-making has become increasingly open—transparent and inclusive.
This tendency has not been the simple product of exogenous forces, but
actively made by its practitioners, particularly strategy consultants externally
and corporate strategists internally. Changes have often been spurred by
professional precariousness; they have typically been made more arduous
by professional permeability. It is time, then, to introduce properly the key
practice changes that have transformed strategy processes over the last six or
so decades.

Practice Change: Strategic Planning, Strategic Management,

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and Open Strategy

Strategy’s movement towards openness has come in steps. The steps are not

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altogether clear-cut, and have often been exaggerated by their makers. At the
same time, there are fundamental continuities, with old practices retaining
widespread currency. None the less, three major steps can be associated with
particular time periods: strategic planning grew to prominence in the 1960s
and early 1970s, strategic management was a phenomenon particularly from
the late 1970s, while open strategy has taken wing in the 1990s and early
twenty-first century.
Strategic planning, strategic management, and open strategy are practices
in the sense of being authoritative, continuous, and shared ways of doing
things, whether analysis, consultation, decision-making, or communication
(Whittington, 2006). As we shall see, strategic planning emphasizes the need

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 Opening Strategy: Practices and Professionals

for deliberate choice and competitive analysis, replacing the inarticulate

intuitions of individual leaders by dialogue among managerial elites. Strategic
management addresses the challenges of strategy implementation, sucking
more people into processes of learning and change. Open strategy insists
still more on including a range of stakeholders, even in the earlier stages of
initial strategy formation, while communicating transparently with both
internal and external stakeholders. Though perhaps still less pervasive than
predecessor practices such as strategic planning and strategic management,
open strategy still claims our attention as embodying much wider trends in
contemporary advanced societies and as extending the earlier incremental
steps towards greater openness inherent in first strategic planning and then
strategic management.
Each of these three practices can be spoken of as coherent and recognizable
‘bundles’ of more particular practices (Nicolini, 2012). Indeed, strategic plan-
ning, strategic management, and open strategy are often more identifiable
by the prominence of component practices than by overt allegiance to the
bundle as a whole. For example, corporate portfolio analysis is a distinctive
component of strategic planning; large ‘town meetings’ play an important
role in strategic management; while the social media-facilitated employee
consultations involved in strategy ‘jams’ are just one technique of open
strategy. Although the origins of each of these main practice bundles
are broadly associated with specific times, the various elements within these
practice bundles often persist, so that particular practices can bleed from
one period to another. It is too simple to talk of a ‘rise and fall of strategic
planning’ (Mintzberg, 1994): many strategic planning practices remain in
common use and ‘strategic planners’ are still widely employed. Although
recognizably different in emphasis, strategic planning, strategic management,
and open strategy all coexist and overlap. Practices persist as driving forces

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linger on, new practices incorporate the old, and old practices are reinter-
preted according to changing times.
Figure 1.1 provides a schematic representation of the evolving contributions

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of strategic planning, strategic management, and open strategy to strategic
openness over time. The vertical axis measures cumulative openness in terms
of degrees of strategic transparency and/or inclusion. Empirically, organiza-
tions will vary in how open they are, but the three practices each add potential
increments of openness. Emerging in the 1960s, strategic planning began to
crack open what had often been entirely opaque: strategy was taken from
inside the heads of entrepreneurs and owners, where it had lain mostly
unconscious and unarticulated, to small groups of top managers and strategy
consultants among whom it could at least be explicit and debated. The new
strategic discourse of the 1960s was thus an initial small step in the direction
of openness. The strategic management that prevailed in the 1980s and 1990s

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 Opening Strategy

Openness
(transparency/ Open strategy
inclusion)

Strategic
management

Strategic planning

1960s 1980s 2000s

Figure 1.1. The rise of openness: strategic planning, strategic management, and open
strategy

spread this openness still further, showing more to the middle managers
and employees whose understanding, motivation, and even ideas were crucial
to effective implementation. Learning became part of strategic change. The
open strategy initiatives that have sprung up from the 1990s onwards are
taking transparency and inclusion another stage up the chain, inviting stake-
holders from inside and outside the organization to get involved even in the
early stages of strategy formation, before implementation. Open strategy
initiatives are rarely complete, with sensitive data withheld and decision-
making authority typically reserved, but they are a long way from the elitist
practices of the 1960s.
Despite the progress of open strategy, the extended lines in Figure 1.1.
indicate that even strategic planning’s tools and techniques continue to be
used: firms still engage in annual planning cycles, review their corporate

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portfolios, and undertake scenario analyses. Equally, the inclusive implemen-
tation processes of strategic management remain in widespread use, with
‘town meetings’ and middle-management strategy workshops being routine

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parts of contemporary organizations. In other words, the practices of strategic
planning and strategic management persist alongside the latest experiments
in open strategy, and remain themselves subject to continued renewal and
innovation. Open strategy adds to the growth in openness as it piles its
initiatives on top of the previous gains of strategic planning and strategic
management.
Strategy’s succession of practices reflects in large part changes in the envir-
onment. As earlier, sociologists propose three exogenous ‘forces’ liable to
prompt professional change: organizational, referring to organizations’
needs in the face of changing conditions; cultural, referring to society’s
broad expectations and capacities; and technological, referring to tools and

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 Opening Strategy: Practices and Professionals

techniques in a wide sense (Abbott, 1988).15 These three forces typically shift
gradually and unevenly across society, with long echoes over time. It is shifts
in these forces that create opportunities for new Strategy practices. But it still
takes the initiative and labour of practitioners, particularly strategy consult-
ants and corporate strategists, to translate these forces into pervasive and
enduring change. Especially as they emerge, forces are too messy for easy
interpretation into practice. To illustrate—and to give a foretaste of the mater-
ials to come—I provide here a sketch of the organizational, cultural, and
technological forces behind strategic planning, strategic management, and
open strategy, and the work required to get each of them bedded in. This book
is not just an intellectual history of better ideas superseding dated ones;
practice change in Strategy is the product of both large forces and hard labour.
To start with, strategic planning was the work of corporate strategists such as
Jack McKitterick and strategy consultants such as Bruce Henderson in the
1960s and early 1970s.16 McKitterick introduced the notion of strategy to
General Electric and established the company’s first corporate planning
department. Henderson founded the first specialized strategy consulting
firm, BCG, and marketed the notion of strategy by publishing his prolific
Perspectives. This work was substantially a response to the organizational
pressures of growing diversification and scale in this period (Whittington
and Mayer, 2000). In the case of General Electric, the company was battling
to control a mass of businesses, from light bulbs to turbine generators, with
challenging new endeavours such as computers as well. Strategic planning
practices responded to these organizational pressures by emphasizing the role
of analysis in selecting markets, the importance of competitive advantage, and
the need for discipline over diverse portfolios. Culture played a part too, as
strategic planning chimed with the West’s modernist rationalism in the post-
war period. The military planners of the influential RAND Corporation in

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California popularized new notions of rational forward-thinking, epitomized
by their invention of strategy in the form of game theory. RAND’s analysts had
an important hand too in creating the American government’s influential

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Planning-Programming-Budgeting System under the Vietnam War’s arch-
rationalist, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.17 Finally, technological
advances propelled strategic planning as well, in particular helping consult-
ants both to develop new analytical techniques and to achieve greater geo-
graphical reach. Primitive computers assisted with calculations of BCG’s
experience curve. A new network of telex machines, international telephone
services, and regular intercontinental flights helped the new strategy consult-
ants spread strategic planning into Europe and Japan during the 1960s.
Strategic management, with its greater emphasis on implementation,
responded to different organizational forces. Battered by oil crises and Japanese
competition from the late 1970s, large Western organizations sought in

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strategic management the tools for rapid change.18 Corporate strategists such
as Arie de Geus at Shell decentralized strategic activity from head offices,
shifting the focus away from top-down analysis towards managerial learning.
Meanwhile, Bill Bain created a new kind of strategy consulting firm focused
explicitly on implementation and change. Strategic management also reso-
nated with broad cultural shifts. On the one hand, there was a new post-
modernist scepticism towards hierarchical military models and elitist forms
of rationality (Whittington, 2004). On the other, managerial culture was being
transformed by the explosive growth of American MBA graduates, from about
6,000 a year in the early 1960s to nearly 70,000 by the mid-1980s (Daniel, 1998).
These MBAs had all been exposed to strategy ideas, and were more ready than
previous generations to take up the responsibilities of strategic management.
Technology too played a part in strategic management. Personal computing
and spreadsheet software facilitated decentralized strategic responsibilities,
while new graphics packages and projector technologies enhanced the ability
to communicate strategies as they were passed down the organization for
implementation.
Technological forces are playing an important role in the recent rise of open
strategy.19 Chief executives routinely blog internally and externally on strat-
egy. They even crowdsource strategy ideas using gaming and social media
technologies. At the beginning of this century, Kristine Lawas at IBM devel-
oped strategy ‘jamming’ technologies, capable of engaging thousands of
employees in extended strategy conversations. However, important though
new technologies are, I shall differ from some accounts by emphasizing
organizational and cultural forces for openness as well.20 Thus organizations’
boundaries with the outside world are becoming more porous in general, with
distinctions between internal and external constituencies increasingly
blurred. Clutching strategy close inside the corporation seems decreasingly

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important. Large corporations also recognize a cultural shift in the contem-
porary knowledge economy. Now creative new strategies often rely less on
senior executives in the C-suite, and more on what employees know on the

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ground. In response, consultants such as Gary Hamel at Strategos and Stewart
Brand at Global Business Network (GBN) have developed new forms of
participative engagement, applying them to traditionally hierarchical organ-
izations like Nokia, Shell, and Whirlpool. Increasingly educated workforces,
with graduates commonly forming half of younger cohorts, are keen to con-
tribute strategically. Contemporary organizations such as Red Hat, composed
of highly skilled software developers, are vastly different to the great manu-
facturing conglomerates such as General Electric in the middle of the last
century. Thus, although new technologies play an important role, changes
in organizational boundaries and employee culture are distinct forces for
strategic openness as well.

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 Opening Strategy: Practices and Professionals

These nutshell accounts of strategic planning, strategic management, and

open strategy describe decades-long transformations of the business world
at large. Touching the vast majority of large organizations in advanced econ-
omies, their repercussions reverberate globally. These practices are macro-level
phenomena, supported by macro-level forces. By contrast with many accounts
of organizational strategy practices (Burgelman et al., 2018), therefore, the
principal concern here is with the development of ‘macro practices’. Strategic
planning, strategic management, and open strategy are macro practices in the
sense that they stretch across many organizations, and many countries. As
such, these macro practices have significance for whole societies.
It is important therefore to understand how macro practices change.
Exogenous forces play a role, but change is not automatic. Change relies
ultimately on the micro-level efforts of particular people within particular
organizations. It is the creativity and entrepreneurship of practitioners like
McKitterick and Henderson for strategic planning, of Bain and de Geus for
strategic management, and of Lawas and Hamel for open strategy that make
change happen. Organizational, cultural, and technological forces provide
opportunities; managers and consultants have to seize and mould them.
Change takes hard work over long periods of time. There is plenty of failure
and frustration. The successes and failures of the past can inform practice
change today. Ghemawat (2016) identifies a declining rate of innovation
within Strategy: the heyday was in the last century. If the field is to be
reinvigorated in the twenty-first century, innovators have much to learn
from the experience of their predecessors.
But everybody should be concerned about the quality of innovation too.
Strategy’s practices have a large capacity for benefit and harm. To return to an
earlier example, the contemporary strategy theory of ‘disruptive innovation’ is
accused of licensing the reckless overthrow of established industries and

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sectors, doing so on the basis of the flimsiest evidence (Lepore, 2014). Long-
established corporations, and even universities and health services, have all
become legitimate targets for ‘disruption’, with little tenderness for inherited

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obligations, experience, or relationships. On the other hand, these macro
practices can work to the good. The blessings can be mixed, as we shall see,
but none the less strategic planning did bring chaotically organized resources
under tighter control; strategic management has helped sharpen up lumbering
giants.
Here I shall emphasize the benefits of greater strategic openness. We spend
large parts of our lives inside organizations; our incomes depend upon them;
our worlds are shaped by the strategies these organizations pursue. We
deserve to be informed and included. And indeed, it has been demonstrated
that employees at every level in these organizations, right down to the
bottom, have a desire for greater transparency and participation in strategy

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 Opening Strategy

(Mantere and Vaara, 2008). At the same time, even investors benefit from
greater openness, as transparency increases value by removing strategic
uncertainty (Whittington et al., 2016). Finally, many large organizations are
immensely powerful today, influencing technology, employment, relation-
ships, trade, and tax through their strategic choices (Whittington, 2012).
Alibaba and Alphabet, Gazprom and Goldman Sachs, Volkswagen and
Walmart are too dominant for control simply by market discipline and too
complex for detailed regulation. They need new forms of accountability. As
citizens, we can demand greater strategic openness as the price of their
continued operation.

Theory and Method

For a book ostensibly about ‘practice’, theory and method may be off-putting
terms. Let me reassure: most of the theory development will be in Chapter 2,
while methodological details are hived off to the Appendix. But having a little
theory here is actually rather practical: theory explains why I shall emphasize
some things and not others, and grounds my argument in general themes.
This book is not a random chronicle of Strategy apart. It is good too to know
something about method: it gives a reason for trusting what follows. After all,
I shall be making some strong claims, particularly regarding the premature
obituaries of strategic planning.
The following therefore is a short orientation for those who might want to
skip Chapter 2 and go directly to the solidly empirical material that makes up
Chapters 3 to 7. Two headlines to start: theoretically, my overall approach is to
turn a ‘sociological eye’ onto a phenomenon, strategy, which is more often
treated as a matter of economic performance (Whittington, 2007); methodo-

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logically, my approach combines many kinds of data—practitioner inter-
views, company archives, advertising statistics, and a variety of published
sources—into an explicitly structured, multi-level, long-run narrative.

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The sociological eye is evident already in my appeal to the sociology of the
professions. But social theory will make a more fundamental contribution: it
supplies a view on the how and why of change. Essential to my approach is a
respect for both structure and agency. In other words, the story of macro
practice change must be more than a matter of large exogenous forces on
the one hand, or a disconnected series of innovative individuals on the other.
The task is to link together macro-level conditions with micro-level initiatives
in a manner that acknowledges their mutual effects. This linking of levels can
be made via two important strands within what is termed ‘practice theory’
(Reckwitz, 2002): first, Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory with its attention
to human agency in the mechanisms of practice change; second, MacIntyre’s

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 Opening Strategy: Practices and Professionals

(1981) theory of virtue with its location of the motives for change in the
external and internal goods of professional practices. For Giddens, the how
of change is a matter of human agency within structural opportunities and
constraints. For MacIntyre, the why of change may be professional as well as
instrumental.
Anthony Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory insists that human achieve-
ments are best explained by looking at both social structures and human
agency. On the side of structures, human activity relies on practices, sup-
ported by rules and resources, which are structural by token of their enduring
and pervasive nature. The structural practices of this book—strategic plan-
ning, strategic management, and open strategy—influence strategists’ work
across decades and nations. The institutionalization of these practices as
enduring and pervasive parts of Strategy is influenced by two other structural
features of the Strategy field: first, the exogenous forces of organizations,
culture, and technology shaping the direction of practice change; second,
the precarious and permeable nature of the field determining the manner of
practice change. On the side of agency, it takes human activity to enact
structural practices into everyday reality. The structural conditions of precar-
iousness and permeability provide constant opportunities for bottom-up
initiative and entrepreneurship. Structural forces need interpreting and inte-
grating. Rules of conduct—from compelling new norms to technical
procedures—have to be worked out. Resources must be gathered together,
often in novel combinations. Thus Strategy’s structural practices are only
institutionalized by the endeavours of specific strategy consultants and cor-
porate strategists working within structural conditions. While innovation is
framed by the structures of Strategy as a professional field and stimulated by
changing forces, the profession’s structural practices are still the product of
agency. Strategy’s innovators manipulate structural affordances and con-

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straints in order to create the practices that guide the daily activities of the
field. The mechanism of practice change is the leveraging of structural context
by human effort.

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Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) provides the motives for this effort. He empha-
sizes how activity can yield both external goods, most obviously economic
rewards, and internal goods, the satisfactions of a job well done. For most
work, and for most of the agency described in this book, the prime motivation
is external. Here practice change is a matter of private economic advantage.
But MacIntyre (1981) alerts us to non-material incentives. Practices are social,
belonging to communities of practitioners—whole occupations, from farmers
to football players. Within these communities, practice performance can
involve professional pride, delivering the internal goods of self-respect and
recognition by peers. Practitioners may strive for the kind of ‘virtue’ we
associate with the notion of the ‘virtuoso’—a willingness to push at the

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 Opening Strategy

established boundaries of performance. External goods are only part of the

story; there is an itch for improvement that comes from internal goods as well.
Practitioners tinker, adapt, and innovate for the joy of it. Strategy has some of
this motivation too—there is a latent sense of professional vocation. Indeed, it
will be important to my argument that the broad trajectory of Strategy
towards greater openness is not just an economic response to changing
exogenous forces, but derives some of its energy from the internal goods of
practices. Moreover, in pursuit of social as well as private benefits, I shall argue
that there is both opportunity and obligation to seize on this trajectory and
take it further.
Both Giddens and MacIntyre already inform the Strategy-as-Practice trad-
ition of research to which this book most obviously belongs (Whittington,
2015; Tsoukas, 2018). Strategy-as-Practice research is concerned with strategy
as a kind of work: strategy is something that people do (Golsorkhi et al., 2015).
For investigators of strategy work, Giddens points to agency, MacIntyre asks
about motives. So far, Giddens has had the greater influence: structuration
theory underpins the standard 3P model of Strategy-as-Practice, connecting
practices, praxis, and practitioners (Whittington, 2006; Jarzabkowski et al.,
2007). Thus practices (structures) are at once the condition for and the product
of the praxis (work) of practitioners (agents). This 3P model has given Strategy-
as-Practice research a vivid and illuminating grasp of strategizing work as it
affects the meso level of particular organizations.
However, Strategy-as-Practice researchers have less regularly got to grips
with practice change at the macro level, that is, change involving many
organizations (Seidl and Whittington, 2014; Jarzabkowski et al., 2015). Simi-
larly, they have neglected motives for change beyond mere self-interest
(Tsoukas, 2018). MacIntyre’s (1981) insistence on the occupational character
of practices helps with the problems of both motivation and macro-ness.

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For him, engaging with practices can involve a sense of virtuosic profession-
alism, the pursuit of better techniques for their own sake. The motives for
practice change may be internal as well as instrumental, therefore. Practice

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innovation is not merely an automatic matter of economic self-interest;
professionalism implies agentic choice about principles of action, whether
material or virtuosic. This recognition of professionalism also supplies a
macro dimension, embracing many organizations. Practices belong to Strat-
egy as a profession, and the nature of that profession influences how these
practices work. The standard 3P model of Strategy-as-Practice research needs
the fourth P of profession. Chapter 2 will introduce a 4P model which, by
adding the cross-organizational dimension of profession to practices, praxis,
and practitioners, allows us to grasp the broad trajectories of Strategy’s macro
practices and the complex motives that drive them. This 4P model links
micro-level activity to macro-level conditions and trends, with the individual

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 Opening Strategy: Practices and Professionals

organizations in-between serving normally as arenas for local variation, and

occasionally as sites for major innovation.
In terms of method, linking together the micro and the macro implies two
lenses. On the one hand, it is necessary to capture broad patterns of practice
change and the forces behind them. This is the macro story, concerned with
practices as commonly shared and relatively enduring institutions within
societies. For this, I shall adopt a wide-angled lens to summarize the general
trajectories of practices, notwithstanding unevenness on the ground. Thus the
lifespan of strategic planning stretches over decades and it has spread through
advanced economies from America to Japan: it differs in every instance but it
is still recognizably the same kind of thing. In this sense, strategic planning
first, then strategic management, and now open strategy have become perva-
sive practices across the world. On the other hand, there is the work involved
in institutionalizing practices.21 In structuration theory terms, the rules of the
game have to be defined, defended, and interpreted; to put these rules into
action, resources have to be assembled, organized, and directed. Understand-
ing the normative and organizational work of change requires a lens closely
focused on the local and the detailed: this is where broad forces are enacted or
resisted and general practices are produced and reproduced. Here I need to get
within particular organizations, to reveal how specific consultants and man-
agers actually worked with the opportunities available to them. Practice
change is not anonymous. It is important to name names and to detail
episodes. It is through this more intimate approach that we can grasp how
macro practices are made, while recognizing their internal variety.
Here I shall outline my four main sources: publications, advertisements,
interviews, and archives. General trajectories of practice change will be traced
partly by published sources, that is, the practitioner books and articles, the
teaching case studies, and academic commentaries that have typically been at

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the heart of earlier accounts of Strategy’s development (Mintzberg, 1994;
Ghemawat, 2002). Many of these sources are designed to build and reinforce
the standard practices of the time. To this extent, published sources may not

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fully represent the messiness of reality, but they do furnish a further kind of
insight. Insofar as these publications are themselves parts of the process
involved in creating new practices, they tell us something about the work of
practice change: practitioners write books and articles as artefacts of advo-
cacy.22 Whether or not it depicts realities on the ground, the published
literature does provide a significant trace of practice creation.
However, general trajectories will also be tracked by a contemporaneous
long-run database of strategy job advertisements stretching from the early
1960s to the year 2000. The published literature tends towards the idealized
and polemical, as authors simplify practices for advocacy or propagation.
Advertisements are less prone to these kinds of biases. They reflect real

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 Opening Strategy

contemporary needs, aiming not to make a case, but to recruit for specific
roles. For recruiters, there is enough at stake in these job advertisements to
curtail extreme misrepresentation. As a source, these advertisements provide a
degree of objectivity. Analysis of the texts of these advertisements can provide
a consistent statistical index of changes in practice, as well as, for example, the
qualifications required of practitioners.
To highlight the work that underlies these general trajectories, I shall focus
on particular moments in specific organizations. Sometimes published sources
will be illuminating here, but I shall also make use of practitioner interviews
and company archives. Of course, interviewees may have trouble recalling
detailed matters of fact, especially over the long time spans of this research.
However, interviews are often useful for providing the practitioner perspective
and for bringing out from published accounts otherwise underappreciated
nuances. They can also illuminate some sense of motive—enthusiasms and
fears can be communicated passionately even decades later. Overall I have
carried out 105 interviews with practitioners or close observers of practice,
including heads of corporate strategy at sixteen corporations and chiefs or
founders at ten prominent strategy consulting firms.
Company archives can give us more direct access to initiatives and difficul-
ties as viewed at the time. Internal presentations, memoranda, and strategic
plans record activities in the moment. Some companies—particularly General
Electric and Shell—offer particularly rich archival data of these kinds. These
companies—alongside BCG, Gemini, McKinsey, and others—have also fur-
nished many interviews, at the same time as being innovative and influential
in terms of strategy practices. It is such larger firms, then, that provide many of
the vignettes that will feature in the pages of this book. General Electric, Shell,
McKinsey, and BCG may not be typical, but they are often prototypical, and
can illuminate deeply the kind of work required for practice change.

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What Follows

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The accounts that follow can be read at several levels. They pass on some of the
lore of the Strategy profession, the kind of practical experience any strategy
consultant or corporate strategist should know. They honour some of the
innovators of the profession, people whose achievements fashionable critics
of formal strategy tend to dismiss. They illustrate continuing truths about
Strategy—the forces impinging on it and the liabilities of precariousness and
permeability. More than all this, these histories aim to combine micro-level
accounts of crucial innovations with a macroscopic view of the evolving pro-
fession as a whole. From this the reader can identify not only what drives the
development of Strategy’s macro practices, but also how to get practice change

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 Opening Strategy: Practices and Professionals

done. In this sense, the book can be understood as a basic manual for practice
innovation in Strategy: the past teaches the practices of practice change.
These accounts are not a complete history of practice change in Strategy, but
rather focus on three practices with particular significance: strategic planning,
strategic management, and open strategy. Together, the three cases allow the
construction of a general theoretical model for practice innovation within the
Strategy field. This model extends the established 3P model of change within
Strategy-as-Practice research to a 4P model involving practices, praxis, practi-
tioners, and profession. Over many decades, it has been the hard work of a
loose collective of strategy consultants and corporate strategists that has
driven practice change, generally in the direction of greater openness. Their
innovations have responded both to the exogenous forces of organizational,
cultural, and technological change and to endogenous impulses for profes-
sional improvement. The manner of practice change has been shaped by
Strategy’s structural characteristics as a professional field—particularly its
combination of precariousness and permeability. Practice change is typically
ragged and rivalrous, with sharp contests and prolonged coexistence.
As readers may notice, this book makes repeated use of alliteration. This is
not just word-play: my intent is to underline important claims. The 4Ps of
practice emphasize their mutual integrity—praxis and practitioners are poorly
understood in isolation from practices and profession. Permeability and pre-
cariousness recognize characteristics of the Strategy profession that influence
much of practice change. Mechanisms and motives insist on agency as well as
structure, while keeping in mind how change may be idealistic as well as
instrumental. Mental and material, and rule-making and rule-organizing,
assert the importance to practice change of both the conceptual and the
concrete. The contrast between macro and micro marks the need to hold
onto the big picture even while painting the intimate miniatures that are

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the particular strength of Strategy-as-Practice research.
The big picture is important. Strategy’s macro practices help direct the
largest corporations in the world. Sometimes these practices work to good

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effect, sometimes to bad. A broad perspective on the manufacture and mar-
keting of macro practices is important for society at large. In this sense, the
materials of this book, and particularly the 4P model, contribute to a distinct-
ive agenda for Strategy-as-Practice research, one that I shall call here ‘macro-
SAP’. As developed in Chapter 2, macro-SAP research is concerned with how
practitioners create and use Strategy’s macro practices, the broad contexts in
which they do this work, and the consequences for whole societies, going far
beyond the fate of individual organizations.
Of course, there are good pragmatic reasons for understanding how macro
practices change as well. These are the tools and techniques that young
managers need to master, and on which consultants build their businesses.

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 Opening Strategy

For business school teachers, they are the core of the strategy curriculum.
Nobody wants to be left behind, and some will want to innovate. Over the
decades covered in this book, the changes have been dramatic. There is a
world of difference between the strategizing of the 1960s, the exclusive sphere
of top executives and Harvard-trained consultants, and the social media-
enabled, crowd-sourced strategy initiatives of today. But the changes have
not been simple. Rather than neat cycles of rise and fall, practice change has
tended to be cumulative. Old tools are not necessarily forgotten, but supple-
mented by the new. With every generation, the repertoire of practices is
becoming richer and more complex.
However, there is one consistent thread to practice change over the last six
decades or so. Strategy’s practices are on a long-run trajectory towards greater
openness, starting even with the first elitist efforts of strategic planning. For
more than half a century, the strategy-making process has been getting more
transparent and more inclusive. The trend is by no means complete: the title
of this book, Opening Strategy, adopts the verb form to underline efforts in a
particular direction rather than a more definite end state. Opening is a work in
progress. This progress is uneven and sometimes unwelcome. Open strategy is
neither sure-fire nor cure-all. It does, however, offer one way of making the
strategies of large corporations more effective and more accountable. By
articulating the trajectory, and the processes that underpin it, I hope to give
this opening of strategy still greater momentum.
I continue as follows. Theory comes in Chapter 2: there I shall introduce
more thoroughly the integration of micro and macro perspectives that
I intend through the 4P model. There too I shall assert the hard repetitive
labour of practice change in a precarious and permeable profession such as
Strategy. The subsequent chapters are solidly empirical, drawing on inter-
views, job advertisements, archives, and published sources both past and

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contemporary. Chapters 3 and 4 consider in turn the two key groups of
professionals, corporate strategists working inside organizations and strategy
consultants coming from outside: for both, precariousness and permeability

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are enduring facts of life, with considerable consequences. If nothing else, the
would-be corporate strategist should read Chapter 3, and the aspiring strategy
consultant Chapter 4. Next Chapters 5, 6, and 7 elucidate the common factors
involved in successive practice changes: first the transition from long-range
planning to strategic planning in the 1960s and 1970s; then the emergence of
strategic management from the late 1970s; and finally the experiments in
open strategy of recent decades. In each case, there are organizational, cultural,
and technological forces at play, but their institutionalization as enduring and
extensive macro practices took specific kinds of work as well—practices of
practice change. These three chapters have lessons for anybody who wants
to innovate in Strategy.

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 Opening Strategy: Practices and Professionals

The final chapter addresses the book’s broader implications: for our
understanding of practice change in Strategy, for policy-makers concerned
with the accountability of large organizations, for professional bodies, and
for academic researchers. Researchers, policy-makers, and professionals alike
need to do more to grasp the macro practices of Strategy as a field. These
practices have widespread repercussions, for corporations and for society.
There are pressing issues of quality control. When we neglect Strategy’s prac-
tices, we underserve important work. We also risk leaving a great deal of
discretionary power unexamined and ill-regulated. We can change Strategy
for the better.

Notes

1. ‘G.E.’s Costly Ventures into the Future’, Fortune, October 1970. In this book, references
to specific and limited empirical details will typically be provided in chapter endnotes,
as here; sources with a more general relevance will be noted in the Bibliography, and
indicated in the text or endnotes using the Harvard date referencing system.
2. J. Whitehurst, The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance. (Cambridge:
Harvard Business Review Press, 2015). In 2018, Red Hat was bid for by another
pioneer of open strategy, IBM.
3. Throughout this book I shall refer to those in staff functions with responsibilities for
thinking about the future strategy of their organizations as ‘corporate strategists’,
although individually they might hold a range of formal titles (long-range planner,
strategic planner, chief strategy officer, or the like). In this I broadly follow Min-
tzberg (1994), as in note 4.
4. Mintzberg (1994) in fact concentrated on in-house corporate strategists, but I include
strategy consultants as well, they being concerned for their clients’ futures. The
organizations at stake might be whole corporations, or individual business units

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within them. Although they may engage in more narrowly focused projects, strategy
professionals are typically concerned with the whole organization, rather than par-
ticularly aspects of it, as for example research and development staffs typically are.

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Like Mintzberg (1994), I focus on those whose primary responsibility is the future,
rather than senior line managers who have day-to-day operational responsibilities as
well: it is corporate strategists and strategy consultants who are most immediately
involved in practice change (see Chapter 2). In describing these corporate strategists
and strategy consultants, I use the terms ‘strategy professionals’ and ‘professional
strategists’ (as in the book’s title) interchangeably, though generally I prefer the first.
5. ‘Field’ here is being used in the institutional theory sense of individuals, groups, and
organizations engaged in frequent interaction and sharing some common meaning
system (Wooten and Hoffman, 2008). Strategy as a professional field is similar to the
field of finance in the early to mid-twentieth century, in which academics and
practitioners of various kinds interacted regularly together, but not yet with strong
professional associations: see Lounsbury (2002).

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 Opening Strategy

6. All speakers at the Chief Strategy Officer Summit, New York, Innovation Enterprise,
12–13 December 2017, accessed 25 April 2018, <https://theinnovationenterprise.
com/summits/chief-strategy-officer-summit-new-york-2017/speakers>.
7. M. Menz, G. Müller-Stewens, F. Barnbeck, T. Zimmermann, J. Uhr, A. Fronzek, and
C. Geissler, Revealing the Chief Strategist’s Hidden Value: How CEOs Can Measure Their
CSOs’ Performance (St. Gallen: University of St. Gallen, 2016).
8. Size of Global Consulting Market from 2011 to 2020, by Segment, Statistica, 2017,
accessed 25 April 2018, <https://www.statista.com/statistics/624426/global-
consulting-market-size-by-sector>.
9. Here’s Where the Next Generation of MBAs Wants to Work, CNN Money, 29
September 2016, accessed 25 April 2018, <http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/29/
news/companies/top-mba-employers-google/>.
10. McKinsey & Co., Welcome to the Operations Practice, accessed 2 May 2018,
<https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/dotcom/client_service/Operations/
PDFS/Operations_at_McKinsey_brochure.ashx>.
11. The trajectory of Strategy’s professional bodies is discussed in Chapter 2.
12. Bruce Henderson’s work at BCG is particularly discussed in Chapters 4 and 5.
13. Bill Bain’s work in establishing Bain & Co. is particularly discussed in Chapters 4
and 6.
14. The open strategy initiatives at Red Hat and other companies are discussed in
Chapter 7.
15. Abbott (1988: 39) identifies four ‘objective’ and ‘external’ forces influencing pro-
fessions: organizational, technological, cultural, and natural. The last is not as
relevant to Strategy as for example to medicine.
16. The work of Jack McKitterick in developing strategic planning at General Electric is
particularly discussed in Chapters 3 and 5; that of Bruce Henderson in Chapters 4
and 5.
17. The role of the RAND analysts is discussed in Chapters 3 and 5.
18. The development of strategic management, including the roles of Arie de Geus and
Bill Bain, is discussed in Chapter 6.

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19. The rise of open strategy is discussed in Chapter 7.
20. Turco (2016) makes a strong case for the importance of new social media in
creating what she calls the ‘conversational firm’.
21. The connection to the Institutional Work tradition of organization theory

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(Lawrence et al., 2013) is discussed in Chapter 2.
22. Many contemporaneous publications are strongly performative, in the sense of
aiming to bring about what they claim merely to describe (Marti and Gond, 2017).
This performativity is particularly evident in the literature surrounding the super-
seding of strategic planning by strategic management, discussed in Chapter 6. In
the late twentieth century, advocates of strategic management frequently exagger-
ated the decline of strategic planning in order to advance their own cause. While
these publications cannot be relied upon as historical accounts, their performativ-
ity does give them an important place in the work of practice change. I should add
here that this present book is also mildly performative: by articulating a long-
standing trend towards more open strategy, I hope to give it more momentum.

22

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