The 10 Lives of George Stalk

But you'd never know it to sit with Stalk 20 months after his ordeal began. Dressed in a tweed sports coat, beard neatly trimmed, oozing vitality, he has regained the 55 pounds he lost and more, thanks to his four-times-a-day chocolate ice cream fix. He leaps from one huge subject to another, nimbly segueing from the growing power of China to the freight logjam threatening the supply chain in this country. Although he sits calmly, the words spill out like water.

If this is what Stalk calls the "new George," it's scary to imagine the old one. But Stalk is now living his own form of time-based competition: Just like the Japanese factory managers he studied, his life is now about getting as much done as possible with maximum efficiency. The projects he takes on these days must have the potential to bear fruit in three to four years. And what was his planning horizon before? "Infinite," he says softly. One has the sense that he's mourning his life, even as it continues. He feels healthy again and the doctors don't see why he can't live a normal life span, but it's not the same. The guru of time is now a slave to it.

Stalk was dead, or at least everyone thought so. He lay in a closed casket at an English church, funereal chords echoing through the rafters, about to be buried after succumbing, finally, to his mysterious illness.

But he wasn't dead yet, although no one knew that because he couldn't speak or rap on the casket. Suddenly, his cell phone rang inside his coffin. It was his assistant, Bronwyn, calling to tell him that a colleague at BCG had just heard that he'd been sick and was sending a plane to pick him up and take him to the Mayo Clinic. "He said to put you on ice," Bronwyn said.

To come to terms with death and then to emerge to talk about it is the type of experience that flows a lot more smoothly on Oprah than it does in the halls of BCG. Perhaps that's why Stalk, when asked what he has learned from the ordeal, shifts uncomfortably in his seat. Later, he emails a list of "ah-has" from the hallucinations: "I have a lot of friends," he writes. "There are no voice mails, emails, or faxes in emergency rooms."

This is not the quality of analysis one expects from Stalk, the ultimate research geek. Particularly for an engineer, it may be much easier to remain in the world of the rational, where theories can be proven. "I am not an expert in this," he says dismissively, "nor have I been sufficiently interested enough to crowd out other things to become interested in this topic."

Stalk is much more interested in the rough-and-tumble rules of Hardball, the culmination of several decades of observing how companies win and lose in the real world. According to the "Hardball Manifesto" that opens the book, "the leaders of the world's most successful companies -- the hardball winners -- believe it is their obligation . . . to see and exploit their competitive advantage to the fullest. And, when possible, the hardball leaders will push that advantage to the point where competitors are squeezed and even feel pain." One particularly well-told example of "unleashing massive and overwhelming force" is Frito-Lay's move against the surging Eagle Snacks unit of Anheuser-Busch, which had made alarming inroads into Frito-Lay's core salty-snacks business. Using a combination of improved quality, price cuts, and better distribution under the inspired direction of then-CEO Roger Enrico, writes Stalk, Frito-Lay fought back -- and put Eagle Snacks out of business.

But while Stalk enjoys playing the role of provocateur, it is not true that his book ignores the role of culture or leadership. Both are vital parts of strategy, he says, but many companies wrongly assume that culture itself is the strategy. The book is a resounding riposte to the notion "that it's somehow crude to talk about yourself as being a winner and by definition, that someone's losing," he says. "Excuse me, strategy matters."

Outside of Hardball, Stalk has limited his work to two other intellectual "buckets" (the BCG bigs took pricing away from him, although he is secretly trying to figure out a way back in). One is developing strategies for competing with the rising power of Chinese companies, which he says are fast becoming America's true rivals rather than simply low-cost sources. In order to survive, companies will have to pursue the Chinese market, and they'll have to improve their supply chains dramatically. Stalk is also working on "strategic dislocation," which means developing a methodology for anticipating the next technologies or concepts that will fundamentally change the world, much as the telegraph, the credit card, and the railroad have.