ABSTRACT
One of the defining features of business schools is their widely shared treatment of corporate strategy within the MBA curriculum. A visitor to leading schools internationally is likely to find, at the appropriate time of year, students heading for their lectures, each carrying the definitive corporate strategy text for the course. In the 1970s it was a little book by Igor Ansoff, entitled Corporate Strategy.2 Later this was replaced by a handful of rather larger books, including at least one by Michael Porter,3 and a general textbook of readings and cases such as the multi-edition work by Gerry Johnson and Kevan Scholes.4 Most recently, the curriculum would demand that they carry more books, to cover newer additions to the strategy curriculum from other ‘thought leaders’ such as Andrew Pettigrew (the behavioural context of change),5 Ikujira Nonaka (knowledge creation),6 and C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel (core competences strategy is widely recognised as ‘what they teach you at business school’).7
