1980s
Management thinkers during the 1980s turned their attention toward Japan, whose leading companies had by that time revolutionized manufacturing through lean-assembly processes and were competing effectively against once-dominant Western players. In the 1982 book The Mind of the Strategist and in this excerpt, which appeared in the Quarterly, McKinsey’s Kenichi Ohmae suggested that Western managers might be taking the wrong approach by trying to compete head to head.
Leading thinkers at McKinsey also honed the application of microeconomics to management and strategy during the 1980s. For example, the cost-curve framework became a powerful tool for analyzing pricing, capacity, and strategy trade-offs in commodity industries.
Similarly, the SCP framework generated practical insights for senior executives about the relationship between industry structure, conduct, and performance. These insights had previously been studied by academic industrial economists, notably Harvard University’s Richard Caves.
In Quarterly articles such as “MACS: The market-activated corporate strategy framework,” McKinsey consultants also continued to refine the strategic concepts they had pioneered during the 1970s.