As the founder of PowerSteering and a practitioner in strategic management and continuous improvement for more than 25 years, I have seen my share of management fads come and go, and even been in the room when some of them were created. 

There were quality circles and total quality management (TQM), of course, but I have been around long enough to remember when manufacturing resource planning (MRP) and MRP II were all the rage. I worked with George Stalk when he brought “Time-Based Competition”—a variant of the Toyota Lean System—to the consulting world in 1985. About the same time, it seemed that Michael Hammer and Index were about to take over the world with “Reengineering” and the latest trend in strategy was creating variations around C. K. Prahalad's and Gary Hamel’s Core Competences of the Corporation (Harvard Business Review, 2009). Entire consulting empires rose and fell on the popularity of the growth share matrix or the REMAP methodology. Those were the days.

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