28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Invaluable Guide to Employing Strategic Management Themes, September 2, 2000
This is the most valuable book ever written on strategic management. Be sure to read and apply its lessons well!
I have worked in the field of strategic management since before it was called that, both as a practitioner and as a consultant. One of my favorite complaints about books in the field is that they emphasize one facet of developing and implementing stratgies and ignore the others. This book is the outstanding exception to that problemmatic standard of tunnel vision. There's no stalled thinking here about strategic management.
If you are like me, you would like to get better results from strategic management. Solving one part of the task and ignoring the others leads to failure just as surely as ignoring strategic managment does. Imbalance in perspective can be equally dangerous. As the authors point out, " . . . The greatest failings of strategic management have occurred when managers took one point of view too seriously."
Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel start out by pointing out that there are five different kinds of strategy definitions (as plan, pattern, perspective, position, and ploy). When you read books about strategy, keep these in mind.
They begin with the tale of the six blind men and the elephant. Each can grasp one element of the elephant, but cannot grasp the whole. That's the situation the authors are warning you against.
They define this work as "a field review not a literature review" so you don't find every book's details. Whew! That's a relief. On the other hand, they are clearly familiar with the literature and cite it where appropriate. The book is designed to "have as much relevance for managers and consultants in practice as students and professors in the classroom." The style is also designed to be "easily accessible." And these goals are well achieved in my view.
Although recognizing that the human mind boggles past 7 items (which seems to be the limit of what short-term memory can retain), they found 10 themes in the field. The first three emphasize traditional left-brained thinking of the sort that dominates in business schools: Design, Planning, and Positioning. The next six are other aspects of strategic management that are more right-brained: Entrepreneurial, Cognitive, Learning, Power, Cultural, and Environmental. The final one is focused on transformation, the school of Configuration. Each one receives its own chapter and its weaknesses are displayed.
In chapter 12, the reader is encouraged to synthesize the 10 themes into integrated use. There is a table (12.1) that neatly summarizes each theme, a figure (12.2) that shows how they are mutually related, and a remarkably useful figure (12.3) that effectively shows how they can be integrated from perspective and in sequencing.
You may be wondering what all of the fuss is about. Basically, strategic management is one of those fields that has yet to emerge with an integrated perspective on the firm. In fact, the problem is poorly perceived because most people are unaware of the areas they are ignoring. In fact, I always create syntheses of these areas in my writing and am often criticized for dealing with subjectively perceived "nonissues" that the readers do not see the importance of. Strategic myopia seems to be a common problem, not just among the scholars.
I feel very indebted to the authors for developing such a wonderful overview that I can recommend to others (including my clients). I also appreciate their clarifying that the important question now for strategic management is creating a useful synthesis. My personal view is that this must be done by creating one simple, effective mindset that encompasses all ten perspectives, without requiring anyone to learn each one directly. My newest book, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, is an attempt to do that.
I strongly urge you to read and apply the lessons in this seminal work on strategic management. I also hope you will find your own novel integrations of these perspectives and share them.
Good luck in expanding your perceptions of strategic management and its potential to help you and your organization succeed!
After you have finished this book, ask yourself which of the perspectives are missing from or underrepresented today in your organization. Then begin to think of ways to add those perspectives.
If you would like to learn more about strategy, you should also read Mintzburg's outstanding book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, which I have also reviewed.
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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Depth makes it slightly heavy but very worthwhile reading, March 14, 2003
I first came across Mintzberg (one of the 3 authors of this book) over 10 years ago while doing my MBA in Europe. At the time I thought his thinking was dead on target. Having spent most of the years since growing a company (learning things that one has difficulty learning in a classroom) and working with people and organizations from all over, I read this book. Almost immediately I found myself agreeing with what is written (easy enough as they start in with explanation and critique of the design and planning approaches to strategy which though part of the game are dangerous if focused on too rigidly).
I found this book to be very comprehensive and it certainly has a lot to offer anybody who wishes to learn about corporate strategy. Being largely a literature review with commentary, it has too much information for people to simply take away a few simple messages to apply in a work situation but I vastly prefer this to "fondue books" that have a single concept which barely justifies a magazine article but which get padded out to be sold as a book. With a little thought, the book can help some very valuable ways of seeing things form in your mind and you can - to use their imagery - get a picture of what an elephant might be.
For readers doing research, I feel you will need to either know or read much of the material referred to in the text to get a high resolution grasp of what the elephant is. For readers looking to use elephants in their business, I recommend that you use a highlighter and, after reading the book, use the highlighted points to form an image of your image and remember that just as there are different kinds of elephants (Indian, African, Female, Male, Adult, Baby) - each one an elephant - so too are there different approaches to strategy. Armed with the thoughts that you can take away from this book you will be able to infuse them into your business and benefit from them.
Mintzberg, Ahlstrand and Lampel have done managers a great service by publishing this book. They don't present a magic wand or a silver bullet but they do lead us to water where we can drink.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Lions and tigers and bears....Oh my!", February 24, 2006
This review is from: Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through The Wilds of Strategic Management (Paperback)
Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel are knowledgeable and congenial tour guides for those who have not as yet explored "the wilds of strategic management." Such expert assistance is especially valuable, given the the fact that -- the last time I checked -- Amazon and its online partner Borders sell more than 53,000 different books on the general subject of strategy. Oh my! Following an apt quotation from A.A. Milne's introduction to Winnie-the-Pooh, the authors dedicate their book to those "who are more interested in open fields than closed cages." They carefully organize their material within 12 chapters which begin with "And Over Here, Ladies and Gentlemen: The Strategic Management Beast" and conclude with "Hang On, Ladies and Gentlemen, You Have Yet to Meet the Whole Beast." The focus of the authors' lively as well as enlightening narrative is on ten different "schools" of strategy formation:
Three are Prescriptive:
Design as a process of conception
Planning as a formal process
Positioning as an analytical process
Six are Descriptive:
Entrepreneurial as a visionary process
Cognitive as a mental process
Learning as an emergent process
Power as a process of negotiation
Cultural as a collective process
Environmental as a reactive process
With regard to the last school, "We call it configuration. People in this school are seeking to be integrative, cluster the various elements of our beast -- the strategy-making process, the content of strategies, organizational structures and their contexts -- into distinct stages or episodes, for example, of entrepreneurial growth or stable maturity, sometimes sequenced over time to describe the life cycles of organizations." The authors devote a separate chapter to each of these ten "schools" and it remains for each reader to determine which school offers the most relevant guidance to the formulation of an appropriate strategy. The authors acknowledge that it can be argued that the last school, one which views strategy formation as a process of transformation, "really combines the others." Read the book and then decide for yourself.
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