眼花缭乱的战略，不断迭代的技术，层出不穷的商业模式，让创业者和企业家越来越迷茫。企业的目标应该是做大还是求快？企业应该开创蓝海还是拥抱竞争？身处一个变化日益加快、不确定性日益增强、一天比一天复杂的商业环境中，选择正确的战略变得无比重要，同时也无比困难。
全球著名管理咨询公司波士顿咨询公司（BCG）最新研究指出,三分之一的上市企业可能会在未来五年内销声匿迹；领先和落后企业之间的差距已达到有史以来最高水平。企业找到有效的战略管理方式，比以往任何时候都更为重要。
继享誉世界的“波士顿矩阵”之后，波士顿咨询公司资深合伙人马丁▪里维斯等在本书中创造性地发明了企业选择最合适战略的实用工具——战略调色板。“战略调色板”中包含了五种截然不同的商业环境，以及与之相应的最适宜战略管理方式。如果行业前景可以预测但难以改变，企业应采用“经典型战略”（高瞻远瞩）；如果行业前景既难以预测又难以改变，企业应采用“适应型战略”（迅速灵活）；如果行业前景可以预测并加以改变，企业应采用“愿景型战略”（先发制胜）；如果行业前景难以预测但有可塑性，企业应采用“塑造型战略”（精心策划）；最后，如果企业在艰难的环境中努力生存和前行，则应采用“重塑型战略”（脚踏实地）。
波士顿会首先帮你评估商业环境，即环境的不确定程度如何、你所在企业改变环境的能力有多大、环境有多严苛等。他们还会根据环境的可预测性、可塑造性、严苛性将现有的战略分成五类——做大、求快、抢先、协调、可行。本书深入解读每一个战略，帮助你将战略和环境匹配起来，决定在什么时候、通过什么方法实施每个战略，避免战略与环境不吻合所导致的恶果。

Big businesses have faced a persistent dilemma in China since the nineteenth century: how to retain control over corporate hierarchies while adapting to local social networks. Sherman Cochran, in the first study to compare Western, Japanese, and Chinese businesses in Chinese history, shows how various businesses have struggled with this issue as they have adjusted to dramatic changes in Chinese society, politics, and foreign affairs. Cochran devotes a chapter each to six of the biggest business ventures in China before the Communist revolution: two Western-owned companies, Standard Oil and British-American Tobacco Company; two Japanese-owned companies, Mitsui Trading Company and Naigai Cotton Company; and two Chinese-owned firms, Shenxin Cotton Mills and China Match Company. In each case, he notes the businesses' efforts to introduce corporate hierarchies for managing the distribution of goods and the organization of factory workers, and he describes their encounters with a variety of Chinese social networks: tenacious factions of English-speaking compradors and powerful trade associations of non-English-speaking merchants channeling goods into the marketplace; and small cliques of independent labor bosses and big gangs of underworld figures controlling workers in the factories. Drawing upon archival sources and individual interviews, Cochran describes the wide range of approaches that these businesses adopted to deal with Chinese social networks. Each business negotiated its own distinctive relationship with local networks, and as each business learned about marketing goods and managing factory workers in China, it adjusted this relationship. Sometimes it strengthened its hierarchical control over networks and sometimes it delegated authority to networks, but it could not afford to take networks for granted or regard them as static because they, in turn, took their own initiative and made their own adjustments. In this book Cochran calls into question the idea that the spread of capitalism has caused business organizations to converge over time. His cases bring to light numerous organizational forms used by Western, Japanese, and Chinese corporations in China's past, and his conclusions suggest that businesses have experimented with new forms on the basis of their historical experiences--especially their encounters with social networks.