Alfred Chandler, Founder of Strategy: Lost Tradition and Renewed Inspiration

Richard Rumelt, Dan Schendel, and David Teece are clear: “The foundation of strategic management as a field may very well be traced to the 1962 publication of Chandler's Strategy and Structure.” For these three doyens of strategy, Alfred Chandler was a fundamental influence on the shape of the strategic-management discipline that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, unlike the two other pioneers they identify, Kenneth Andrews and Igor Ansoff, Chandler stood firmly outside the discipline, working as a business historian, not as a strategist. Remarkably, it is Chandler's work that resonates most strongly in the discipline today and, I shall argue, still offers the most powerful inspiration for scholarly work in the future.