Customer Reviews

Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through The Wilds of Strategic Management

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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.

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.

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.

An elaboration of concepts that Mintzberg has been writing about for a decade: how different mental models of strategy can be classified. This is NOT a how-to-run-a-company book. This is an intellectual exercise in the taxonomy of schools of thought about strategic management. If you are a strategic planner, read this book for its own sake. It is the antithesis of MBA texts; it is about epistemology and competing perspectives, not about a single "truth". After reading this, the obscure academic literature on management will be more accessible.

This book provides a great introductory overview of the field of Strategic Management and is useful to any MBA or consultant with an interest in that area. It provides an overview of 10 schools of strategy, with an assessment of the contributions made by, and a brief critique of, each school. This helps you learn to spot the pitfalls of using one approach exclusively.

The text can occasionally be a bit academic however, since cases are not the authors' intent, so don't expect many "real world" examples. Nor is the book exhaustive, though it does provide a bibliography for further reading. Finally, the attempt to pull all 10 approaches together, while an admirable effort, may be little more than wishful thinking, since the tenets of some schools are difficult to reconcile.

With this in mind, the book is a great starting point for those exploring the field and a handy refresher for those with more experience. If you're interested in Strategic Management, this is as good a place to start.

Mintzberg has done in previous books a superb analysis of planning as well as management processes (Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning and Mintzberg on Management). This new book is a absolutely necessary for anyone interested on strategy, be it from a conceptual point of view or day-to-day building / developing strategies in real life. In a time when people emphasize changes brought by the internet, e-commerce etc to every company's operations, the book offers a complete review of each strategic school strengths & weaknesses. This sort of view develops one's capabilities of integrating these changes into the strategy process without buzzwords (exception the strategy safari title...).

Managers do not need formulas, but a full grasp of all available techniques that can bring superior performance to an organization. The book shows some pitfalls of over-emphasizing certain aspects that are always the cornerstone of formal companies - some processes that are more conceptual than real life. And it brings real life processes back into the strategy process and how to understand and manage them proactively.

If you will have to read ONE strategy book in your life, this is it. Excellent overview and introduction to different schools with pros and cons. Sometimes a bit sarcastic, but that only makes it readable. If you're an aspiring MBA student; read this and you'll even find the strategy courses funny and easy. If you're an practitioner; read this and learn how to see through all your quick-fix consultants that shows up with a new strategy model every now and then.

In Short: an extremely useful and interesting book.

Mintzberg et al have done an incredible job of summarizing ten different schools of business management thought. From the more conservative case-management approaches through the learning organization to the multiple-approach configuration school, they present business philosophy in a consistent and well-developed format. Particularly valuable are the charts in the final sections of the book that compare the different schools, where they are most commonly found, and how to recognize them. The perspective gained from considering ten different approaches to management is invaluable. This book is a recommended reading in the Athabasca University (Canada) MBA program I am enrolled in, but it fact it has essentially summarized the content of the Strategic Management course entirely. Highly recommended reading for any manager who would like a broader prespective on business strategy.

Ok, I got the Kindle version and was reading it on the DX but it was quite horrible. Lists and tables are not formatted properly, hence all the texts just get lumped together, which makes it really hard to read through the bulleted points; the bullets don't exist and there is no line break to seperate each points from each other. Diagrams (i.e. images) are blur and pixelated; they are probably meant for use on the Kindle 1 & 2 where the screen resolution is smaller. Lastly, text boxes appears without border lines, hence you would most like get confused when the paragraph suddenly changed subject. Stay away from the Kindle version if possible. Oh, and the first chapter should have 4 figures but they are all missing in the Kindle version. You make the call whether to buy the Kindle version.

For a summary of the book, I'd recommend Mr. Gerard Kroese's review elsewhere on this page. It is fair and accurate. What I find most entertaining about this work is the authors' (Mintzberg's mostly) masterful deconstruction of Professor Porter's positioning models. Mintzberg has spent the past 25 years railing against them, seeing them as altogether static sieves through which reality is filtered. An effective strategy, Mintzberg argued in "Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning" is one that interacts with and engages its environment. I'd put myself in the "environmental school" as Mintzberg characterizes that perspective in this book.

Most of all, this book is well-written, as is most of Mintzberg's work, and is filled with such whimsy as a serious book strategic management can muster.