ABSTRACT
In his great book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy , Richard Rumelt recounts how the Italian coffee industry – globally dominant in its sector – completely failed to see how the coffee shop market would grow to be huge and that it would be dominated by an American fi rm from Seattle. According to Rumelt, the origins of their strategic error lay in the fact that they simply didn’t see what Starbucks sells as coffee (and many of my Italian friends would agree with them!).
