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Purpose – This article provides opinions about key issues in strategy and the future to the readership. Design/methodology/approach – This article is an opinion column. Findings – Organizational “stovepipes” must be managed very carefully. Research limitations/implications – Based not on rigorous research but on the author's experience of planning engagements across a wide variety of private and public enterprises. Practical implications – Alerts readers to the importance of organizational management. Originality/value – Expresses opinions that the author believes have not been expressed in quite this way before.

The paper expresses the author's viewpoint on business strategy.

The paper is based on the author's two decades of professional experience as a business strategy consultant.

There are certain interesting parallels between standard business thinking and autism.

The paper expresses ideas in a way that the author believes they have not been expressed before.

Review and discussion of the book Lords of Strategy by Walter Kiechel III.

Opinion column.

“Strategy” has not been seen as something in which businesses must engage. The “Strategy revolution” Kiechel outlines arose in the 1960s with the new breed of consulting firm, had its heyday then and in the 1970s, and declined thereafter into something like incoherence and a focus on tactical, financial, and cost‐cutting approaches.

Reviews an important book and extracts some lessons about business strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the retirement of the Baby Boom generation and the fiscal crisis that almost certainly will accompany it.

Opinion column.

This column lays out the reasons why the current fiscal situation is unsustainable and why the retirement of the Baby Boomers will cause economic dislocation for the entire economy, shaping strategic choices for many business decision‐makers.

Advance warning about a serious issue that will cast a shadow on the entire strategic business environment for the next few decades.

Organization Distributed Being From “The Death of Hierarchical Organization” by Patrick B. Marren, senior consultant with the Futures Group. Essay to be included in 1997 Handbook of Business Strategy, Faulkner & Gray, New York. The mechanistic model of business assumed that businesses were essentially machines, and people, money, and information, as well as “hard assets,” were the components of the machine. It also assumed that management, as “operator” of the machine, could centrally control its components. These assumptions provided a fairly good approximation of reality for a very long time (indeed, the very idea of “reengineering” depends on them). But now it is apparent that the central assumptions of this model are very questionable. What could replace it?

September 11 changed the way strategic planners must look at their companies' futures.