In the late 1970s, Fred Gluck led an effort to revitalize McKinsey’s thinking on strategy while, in parallel, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman were leading a similar effort to reinvent the Firm’s thinking on organization. The first published product of Gluck’s strategy initiative was a 1978 staff paper, "The evolution of strategic management."

The ostensible purpose of Gluck’s article was to throw light on the then-popular but ill-defined term "strategic management," using data from a recent McKinsey study of formal strategic planning in corporations. The authors concluded that such planning routinely evolves through four distinct phases of development, rising in sophistication from simple year-to-year budgeting to strategic management, in which strategic planning and everyday management are inextricably intertwined.

But the power of the article comes from the authors’ insights into the true nature of strategy and what constitutes high-quality strategic thinking. The article is also noteworthy for setting forth McKinsey’s original definition of strategy as "an integrated set of actions designed to create a sustainable advantage over competitors" and includes a description of the well-known "nine-box" matrix that formed the basis of McKinsey’s approach to business portfolio analysis.

Ten years later, a team from the Firm’s Australian office took...