Chris Zook is a director at Bain & Company. Chris is co-head of the Global Strategy practice and is a former member of Bain’s management committee and investment committee. During his more than 25 years at Bain, Chris has specialized in companies whose primary strategic concern is the search for new sources of profitable growth. He has worked in a range of industries including information, healthcare, computers and venture capital.
With Bain & Company partner James Allen, Chris is the author of the book Repeatability: Build Enduring Businesses for a World of Constant Change, published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2012. Repeatability presents an argument for simple, great repeatable models to realize enduring, profitable growth.
He is also the author of Profit from the Core: a Return to Growth in Turbulent Times, an updated edition of his 2001 best-selling business book, Profit from the Core: Growth Strategy in an Era of Turbulence, which offers an approach to assessing and making the most of core business opportunities. Chris’s sequel, Beyond the Core: Expand your Market without Abandoning your Roots (Harvard Business School Press, 2004), was voted one of the top 100 business books ever written. It examines how companies that have fully exploited their core businesses can systematically and successfully expand into related, or "adjacent" areas. Unstoppable: Finding Hidden Assets to Renew the Core and Fuel Profitable Growth (Harvard Business School Press, 2007) completes the series and examines what to do when your growth formula of the past begins to approach its limits, demanding that your company change its strategic focus and redefine its core.
These “growth trilogy” books have received widespread critical support. Beyond the Core was recognized by The Economist as one of the top five business and economic books in the year it was published. Unstoppable was identified by The Financial Times as one of the notable business books of the year. Based on his work on how companies grow, Chris was recently included by the Times of London in its biannual list of the 50 Most Influential Global Business Thinkers.
Chris’s other Harvard Business Review credits include, "How to find your next core business," "Open-market innovation" and "How to think strategically in a recession." He has also been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New York Times, Fortune, Forbes, and BusinessWeek. He's been a featured guest on NPR, CNBC, and Bloomberg TV and is a frequent speaker at business forums, such as the World Economic Forum at Davos, and appears regularly on television and radio.
Chris received a B.A. from Williams College, an M. Phil. in Economics from Exeter College, Oxford University, and holds Master's and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University.
