1970s
The decade of the 1970s was a period of great ferment in the field of strategy. Former managing director Fred Gluck's 1978 staff paper, “The evolution of strategic management,” written for McKinsey consultants and later published in abridged form in the Quarterly, sought to shed light on the true nature of strategy, on what constitutes high-quality strategic thinking, and on the then-popular but ill-defined term “strategic management.”
The 1970s also saw the emergence of several seminal frameworks, such as the 7-S model of organizational effectiveness, the business-system approach to describing a company’s core functions, and the nine-box matrix for reviewing a portfolio of businesses.