George Stalk
Senior Advisor
Toronto
George Stalk joined Boston Consulting Group in 1978. He became a senior partner and managing director and was a longtime member of the firm’s Strategy, Consumer, Organization, and Operations practices. He has focused his consulting career on helping companies create sustainable competitive advantage and has advised the top management of a range of organizations—mostly in manufacturing, technology, and consumer products—throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
As a BCG Fellow from 2008 through 2017, George explored how companies can better strategize in times of high uncertainty. Most companies make few changes to their proven business models and global supply chains—tweaking only in order to lower costs or improve operational effectiveness. George's research focused on how they can better overcome the dangers of inertia.
George’s thinking on corporate strategy has shaped the modern business environment. His early years with BCG were spent in Tokyo, where his work led to BCG’s breakthrough notion of “time-based competition” and George’s best-selling book Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition Is Reshaping Global Markets. This innovative thought leadership has helped countless companies find new ways to create sustainable competitive advantage.
George also wrote Kaisha: The Japanese Corporation and Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win? His latest book, Five Future Strategies You Need Right Now: Memo to the CEO, came out in 2008.
In 2008, he was inducted as a fellow in the Strategic Management Society, joining BCG founder Bruce Henderson as the only professional consultants in the society. Outside of BCG, George serves as an adjunct professor of strategic management for the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and is a fellow of the Strategic Management Society and a senior fellow of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.
Traditional strategy processes are incompatible with agile ways of working. How can organizations balance autonomy with alignment?
A tempo-based advantage relative to rivals is the best long-term insurance against disruption. After all, incumbents have major advantages—and most startups fail.
Three strategic options can help companies position themselves to seize attractive—but uncertain—opportunities, conserving capital and delaying final decisions until things become clearer.
With growing transport congestion a global megatrend, smart companies are taking control of their fate with strategic, game-changing actions that cut time and costs from the supply chain.
In today’s increasingly turbulent business environment, many large companies could benefit from emulating mavericks—small outlier companies that think and act differently from incumbents.
The experience curve theory still holds, particularly in specific industries. But to succeed in today’s environment, many companies need to develop an additional kind of experience.
BCG founder Bruce Henderson’s rule, conceived in 1976, still holds valuable lessons for companies in many industries.
