Regis McKenna, author of the classic Relationship Marketing: Successful Strategies for The Age of the Customer.

Robert H. Bloom and Dave Conti’s book The Inside Advantage: The Strategy at Unlocks the Hidden Growth in Your Business, and Rick Kash and David Calhoun’s book How Companies Win: Profiting From Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What Business You’re In.

Jim Collins’ Harvard Business Review article “Turning Goals Into Results: e Power of Catalytic Mechanisms

Michael E. Porter’s classic 1996 Harvard Business Review article titled “What Is Strategy?

The focus on the firm as a collection of capabilities gives a different and more illuminating perspective for understanding the extraordinary diversity of business organisations and of businesspeople over geographies and over time. The core ideas in this book – collective intelligence, radical uncertainty, disciplined pluralism, relational contracts and the mediating hierarchy – have been extensively developed and discussed by earlier writers, though much of that work has been outside the context of business organisation. The relevance of each to the argument of this book arises from a belief that in the modern world successful commercial relationships are not simply instrumental and transactional; they are social and are embedded in a wider framework of communities and teams. That transactional view was both incorrect and unattractive. This book is written in the hope that a better account of how business and its stakeholders flourish will point the way not just to a better understanding of business but to the better conduct of business itself. In a successor volume I will try to explain some of the implications of that understanding for both business policy and public

Policy.