Customer Reviews

Strategic Management

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

As a practicing general manager, I found this book to be one of the most useful I have read on the subject of strategic management. The text is clearly written and illustrated with numerous current examples. Unlike many other books on strategy, this one does an excellent job of integrating internal organizational issues with considerations of market competition. Most importantly for me, perhaps, is that the treatment of how strategy is actually carried out in large organizations rings true, giving me a high level of comfort with the relevance of the material. The book gave me numerous strategic insights and left me with a much improved integrated framework of strategy. I highly recommend it to any general manager wishing to improve his strategic thinking.

I am an MBA student at MIT. We use this textbook in our Strategy course.

My opinion is that this textbook is very valuable. I have ready it very carefully, and it has had a tremendous impact on the way that I approach strategic issues. However, the book is poorly organized and the writing is opaque at times. This means that the benefits of the book become apparent only after careful and repeated readings.

The most important content of the book consists of the frameworks it provides. But these frameworks are not consistently labeled, numbered, or organized -- so the reader has to go to get great effort to pull them out and categorize them. Once found and understood, these frameworks are very valuable. I hope that future editions of the book will do a better job of explicitly enumerating and organizing these frameworks.

In summary, if you are willing to put in the time to carefully read and digest this book, it is highly valuable. But a superficial reading will be of little benefit.

As a final note, this textbook is much enhanced if it is read in conjunction with the many business school cases it references (such as EMI and CT scanners, or Disney and diversified acquisitions). The book itself provides only a few examples.

This is a very accessible introduction to strategic management. The book has very good coverage, is current, and has lots of examples to illustrate the concepts. Easily one of the best management books I have read in a while. It can be approached at multiple levels. You can browse through for the main concepts, but it also has lots to make you really think about if you want. You won't regret buying it!

This is a book on strategic management written by three leading scholars at the Stanford Business School. I was therefore not surprised that the book has the latest academic concepts, nor that there are many current examples drawn from high-tech and electronic commerce. What did surprise me is how relevant the concepts are to my own company and industry which is a manufacturing firm in a fairly old-fashioned industry, and how balanced the examples are between the "old economy" and "new economy".

This is definitely a thinking person's book. You can get a lot out of it by going through it once fairly superficially. But what I like is that I keep get more out of it when I go back to any chapter and read it more carefully. The authors have simplified but clearly a lot of thought has gone into each paragraph so that if you read it with care you pick up the nuances.

The book balances consideration of factors internal to the firm (with a very nice treatment of what the authors call "ARC" - architecture, routines, and culture) and external factors. There is also a good, practical treatment of how strategy should be done, written by people who obviously have seen the process at work.

Had this as a prescribed text for my MBA - Strategy and Structure class. What a great class, and what a great book. The material is quite thoughtful and takes some time to absorb, but as they say - no pain, no gain. If you take the time to absorb the material - i.e. read and reread - and ponder, it really helps you crystallize your concepts. Also helped that we had a great professor to complement the learning from this book via augmenting case discussion. This is a book that I reach for, when I have to revisit key elements of strategy.

I would greatly encourage those who were disappointed to revisit the text. The book is worth many reads - and certainly more than one.

As a senior lecturer in Strategic Management at BA and MBA levels and in a multi-national class context I must say that this is a very good and crisp clear book, confirmed also by my students for over 7 years.

Only criticism is that maybe it is time to review the text and provide all the visuals (slides, models etc) on a CD. Nevertheless certainly recommended also non english mother tongue readers.

Prof. David Ward

The book is crystal clear. The structures of the book was developed in a brilliant manner. It describes all relevant issues simply but with enough depth. It covers strategy from all relevant viewpoints as OT, IO. It even adds a final chapter on process. This last chapter is a fine summary of the advances in strategy-making process developed in recent years. I would recommend this book as must in any strategy course at undergraduate and MBA levels.

I really wanted to give this text a fair shake...I really did (and believe I am). However, the whole problem I had with it began in the first chapter, and five later, I'm simply disgusted. I'm an MBA student and along with classes in Import/Export and International Business Law, this is my last prior to graduation. In other words, this is the last of a multitude of texts I've read over the last six years of business study so I do have a clue. I also am graduate level in three languages other than English (and they are not my native tongue), so I'm well read overall...
Anyway, I immediately noticed as did another reviewer here, that this material is comprised of basic business concepts, but the twist lies in the fact that every simple concept was made into something extraordinary through use of flowery language. I've felt that every simple aspect of business design, structure and operation is developed into some enormously complex "concept" and the more I read, the more I am insulted. The text takes very simple examples of what an overall operation within the world of business might be comprised, and makes them difficult to understand and boring. I read a chapter, awake, read it again and mumble "so tell me something new...tell me something I don't know..." If you cannot improve upon the wheel, why try to reinvent it? I'm really sorry guys, but this is a miserable work. Don't take it too personally. I'm sure that people who want to sit around smoking fat cigars and talking about business "concepts" will surely be impressed, but I am a student who wants real-world advice about running real businesses. This is fluff pure and simple and presents nothing new in management strategy aside from other ways to word simple ideas. Perhaps my education has been so progressive that this is all old hat and so, my problem...I think not. Better luck with the second edition. Hope I haven't bruised any egos, but for the price of texts today, I want to learn something. If a professor falls short, this text is all a student has to fall back on for his time, effort and money.

I read this while in my MBA program and loved it. It gives a great overview of strategy, but also integrates a lot of what I had learned in economics, OB, competitive strategy, entrepreneurship, and international management! Great chapters on organization, industry analysis, demand-side increasing returns, and strategy process. I found the new frameworks for industry analysis and analyzing organizations very useful.

Overall the concepts in the book are (1) important to understand and (2) easy to understand. So why is the book so poorly organized, the writing horrible, the examples unhelpful, and the book an overall disappointment? This isn't multi-variable calculus. The only logic I can posit is that the authors were more interested in writing a scholarly text than a readable one. Although many concepts are made unnecessarily complicated, the biggest grip I had is with the writing style. The examples only loosely tie in with concepts, and flowery "professor-speak" obfuscates relatively easy concepts pointlessly. And in their effort to be PC, they'll switch pronoun gender from "he" to "she" or "him" to "her" multiple times, even in the same example. Just sloppy. But the text covers the basics, so it gets 2 stars.