To fight the wild swings in supply & demand unleashed by the pandemic, companies need to adjust — rather than abandon — their just-in-time inventory management system.
For every dollar that can be removed by reengineering costs and time out, several more can be saved by rethinking how to use speed to serve customers better and competitively reposition the company. — George Stalk
Education
- MBA, Harvard Business School
- MS, aeronautics and astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- BS, engineering mechanics, University of Michigan
Honors and Awards
- Named one of Consulting magazine’s Top 25 Consultants in 2000, 2001, and 2002
- Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Award in 1989
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.
