George Stalk

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, Stalk 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. Stalk's research focused on how they can better overcome the dangers of inertia.

Stalk’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 Stalk’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.

Stalk 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, Stalk 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.