This is a strategy book. It is about how to strategise creatively, ethically, effectively. Our message is: we humans are pragmatic in our wise moments, and pragmatic strategy is apt for bettering firms, communities, society and Mother Nature. If you want to walk in the world wisely, this book is for you.

But why should we bother with another strategy book, one wonders, at a time when typing ‘strategic management’ and ‘business policy’ pops up more than 76,000 results from Amazon and 3,380,000 from Google Scholar? To answer this question, in this introductory chapter let us have a brief look at how strategy has been doing, what is at stake and what pragmatism means to strategy.

STRATEGY IN A CHANGING WORLD

Strategy is one of the oldest practices of humankind. Remember The Art of War of Sunzi (孙子), the ancient Chinese general? Yet as a systematic corporate undertaking, a scholarly i eld of study and a multibillion- dollar consultancy industry, the search for modern strategy did not emerge until the 1950s–1960s when Kenneth Andrews at the Harvard Business School delivered a course called Business Policy, Igor Ansoff published his seminal book Corporate Strategy in the US, Alfred Sloan illustrated the M-form corporate structure in My Years with General Motors and Alfred Chandler laid down the founding blocks of Structure and Strategy , The Visible Hand and Scale and Scope. That was the time of America’s undisputed industrial might, economic success and acclaimed business education. For decades, all this served companies well. Subsequently, as McDonaldisation spread around the world, so did strategy based on Western, or more precisely Anglo-Saxon, mindsets and experiences – the world was flat.