Book Brief: Strategy is Destiny

Strategy is Destiny: How Strategy-Making Shapes a Company's Future
By Robert A. Burgelman
Free Press, February 2002
464 pages, $32.50

Most strategy books look at numerous companies and trends and then try to distill what has been learned into a general approach. Stanford Business School Professor Burgelman takes the opposite tack: Given unprecedented access to Intel, he draws generalizations about how all businesses should be run after studying the company in depth for a dozen years. While the writing is dense, and there is far more detail than anyone could want, some of Burgelman's conclusions—that strategy can be used to impose order, for instance, and that firms need to capitalize on their core strengths and search out new opportunities simultaneously—should resonate with senior managers.