The experience curve says that your costs should probably decline by 15% or 20% with every doubling in your experience making a product, approximately how many of them you turn out. It also says that if you have the biggest market share, meaning the most experience of anybody in your competitive set, you should have the lowest costs, and the resultant capability to underprice your competitors, maybe forever. The abiding lesson of the experience curve is that companies need to discipline themselves to keep reducing their costs, year in, year out, if they are to remain competitive.

The most important change, and it's been going on for at least three decades, is the increasing "professionalization," if that's a word, of the faculty. By professionalization I mean the tendency of faculty members to have Ph.D.'s in their academic specialties, and for these specialties to be ever more narrowly defined. The higher-rated schools may have chief executives in residence or retired execs on three-year teaching fellowships, but the days when most faculty members had considerable prior experience as businessmen or women - those days are mostly over.

Most of the experts agree that strategy will have to become more "adaptive", meaning that strategies will change faster based on information from people on the corporation's front lines - dealing with customers, fending off competitors. This won't represent a new revolution, but rather the continued speeding up of the one that's been going on. Everything will move faster, and competitive advantage disappear more quickly than ever.

People believe that management consultants are mostly useless parasites. Up until about 1980 it was consultants more than anyone else who came up with the critical concepts behind strategy. The history of strategy suggests there are lots of things consultants can do for a company that the company can't typically do for itself.

People believe that companies have always had strategies, dating back at least to likes of Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie, maybe to the contractors who built the Pyramids. As it turns out, it was only in the 1960s and 1970s that a new breed of "business intellectuals" began to develop the intellectual framework that allowed companies to look at the three "C's" of any good strategy - namely their costs, customers, and competitors - in an integrated way.

People say that ideas aren't important in business. Okay, people say, maybe an idea for a new product, but the rest is all execution, making it happen. Not so. As the strategy revolution demonstrated, ideas can be the key tools for making your business competitive.

The best discipline, maybe the only discipline that really works, is self- discipline.