It could all have gone horribly wrong. During a balmy Dutch summer working for Shell in The Hague, Mia de Kuijper gave a presentation forecasting that the system of pricing oil around the Opec price would be replaced by an open market based on spot prices.

“I gave the presentation and I said that there would be spot markets and it is going to be like a snowball.

“So they basically threw me out of Shell Centre. The co-ordinator for supply and trading said: ‘Listen, dear, oil is not a commodity. We are real oilmen and we set the price. You’re some girl and you don’t know a darned thing, so please go away.’ ”

No sooner had she returned to Harvard, to complete her PhD than Shell’s strategy department pleaded with her to come back and flesh out her presentation.

“We called it the Humpty Dumpty scenario,” she said, “because once it’s broken up you can’t put it back together again. It was going to be a new market and oil companies were going to have to learn.”

Not least learn that an economist such as Ms De Kuijper can have a key role to play in business. Any business. Especially in a recessionary — or perhaps post-recessionary — era like this one.

Ms de Kuijper, after a career working with some of the world’s biggest companies, has emerged as head of a new business school, the Duisenberg School of Finance in Amsterdam, and as the author of what financial experts are hailing as “an intellectually courageous” book. The publishers of Profit Power Economics describe the book, which comes out next month, as the “first comprehensive manual of competitive strategy for the economic realities of the 21st century”, realities that include an era of “near-perfect information” and a system in which everyone is interdependent and where competition is even more intense than people realise.

Classical economic theory is based on the idea of people making independent decisions about supply and demand that set the market price. One has only to look at last year’s crash to see the result of the independent actions taken by sub-prime homebuyers, mortgage advisers, the inventors of complex securitised mortgage-backed securities and central bankers and regulators to show how interdependent they were.

But how does this affect the manager of a small or a medium-sized business or entrepreneurs deciding where best to allocate their start-up capital? According to Ms de Kuijper, it comes down to identifying the business’s “power nodes”, 12 attributes that most influence the company’s financial outcome.

The example that runs through the book is the decision by PepsiCo — where Ms de Kuijper worked as head of strategy — to expand globally by exploiting its brand and recipe and outsourcing the risks and costs of manufacturing, bottling and delivering the drinks to overseas companies. The result was a 25 per cent rate of return for the United States-based company and as little as 6 per cent for the local businesses. “The parent company only had to own two parts of their business. These were sources of profits and points of leverage,” she said.

The key is to identify where the power nodes lie. “A lot of companies have a beautiful strategy but it is not concentrated on increasing the return on invested capital. If you want to start a company, you should ask: ‘Do I have any of the 12 power nodes?’ And that should be the basis of the strategy. Then build on that.”

She also seeks to shatter the idea that perfect information means that profits will be competed away. The fact that Google can become a global powerhouse within a highly competitive market, or that people stampede for iPods when cheaper and better rivals are available, disprove that, she argues. Instead, those examples show that success can come from “riding the information flows. Whether you are selling shampoo or a financial product, you have to think about where your message will be pulled out by people. How do I get my message across in a new world where there is a plethora of information?”

In a traditional model, a company would be integrated in a vertical supply chain and would worry about rivals in its own sector. Ms de Kuijper believes that a company must think against whom it might be competing above and below it — or even in different industries.

“For instance,” she said, “Vodafone thought that mobile phones were its business, but they didn’t tell Steve Jobs [chief executive of Apple] and [now there is] the iPhone. They are a different industry but they are taking over. The game is no longer about market share but about who has the profit power. I can hollow out your profit even though I am in a very different business. That’s how you have to think about it and, if you don’t, then other guys are going to take the cherries out of your business.” If that happens, managers must change course swiftly. “If the source of profit moves some place else, you have to be very strong as a CEO to direct your company towards the new source of profits.”

Given the length of her career in the United States as an investment banker with Credit Suisse First Boston and Morgan Stanley and inside corporate America, it is hardly surprising that the examples she gives in the book come from the US. It would be wrong, however, to think that her model is a purely American one.

In Britain, for example, she said that the decision of Orange and T-Mobile to merge their UK mobile phone units showed that they had realised that their power nodes were not in their network systems. “It does not make sense to have two independent networks because that is not where the value lies.

“The value lies with managing your relationships with your customers and that is where you should put your efforts.”

She said, too, that the merged Kraft and Cadbury would have to decide where its power node lies — if the deal goes through — and how it would manage its evolving relationship with the large supermarkets.

“How is that battle going to shake out?” she asked. “You can use this framework to analyse almost every story in the news.”

The 12 power nodes

1. Brand: names so well-known they become a byword for a product

2. Secret, special or proprietary ingredients: an essential element of a product, eg: Coca-Cola recipe

3. Regulatory protection: privileges granted by government to run operations, eg: nuclear power

4. Focused financial resources: easy access to well-priced capital

5. Customer base with switching costs: a customer base with no incentive to switch supplier

6. Proprietary processes or modus operandi: a way of doing business exclusive to that company

7. Distribution gateways: getting close to your customers without intermediaries

8. Dominant position in a layer: control of a horizontal layer in a vertical supply chain, eg: Tetley’s tea

9. Increasing mutual utility: where the value of a product to a user increases with each new consumer

10. Aikido assets: the ability to use consumer feedback to your own commercial advantage

11. Filters and brokers: ways of spreading or blocking information used to a company

12. Hubs: a network that attracts a disproportionate amount of links to other choices

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