Strategy Safari ('financial Times' S.) [Paperback]

Henry Mintzberg (Author)

Book Description

Series: 'financial Times' S. | Publication Date: July 20, 2001

"Henry Mintzberg's views are a breath of fresh air which can only encourage the good guys." The Observer "My favourite management book of the last 25 years? No contest. The Rise & Fall of Strategic Planning by Henry Mintzberg." Tom Peters The word strategy has been around for a long time. It is considered to be the high point of managerial activity, and managers use the word both freely and fondly. But what does the word really mean? Strategy Safari sets out to provide an answer. In this colourful primer, Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel draw together diverse strands of strategic thought into ten distinct schools. In a final chapter they seek to blend the schools together; pointing out however that a truly unified theory may not be possible or desirable. The result is a thoughtful and readable guide to the wilds of strategic management. Stratefy Safari can be read by anyone with an interest in business strategy but it is especially useful to those managers, scholars and students who must reconcile academic theory with the everyday reality of modern corporate practice. "Like butchers, the academics and consultants chop up reality for their own convenience...managers can allow themselves no such luxuries.They can use it only if it remains intact as a living being."

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Mintzberg is one of the best guides for an analysis of strategy and this book is the perfect starting point for someone interested in understanding more about it." - Director Magazine, January 2009 (readership 173,000)

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From the Back Cover

"Henry Mintzberg's views are a breath of fresh air which can only encourage the good guys." The Observer

 

Strategy Safari – gives you the ‘big ten’ in the strategy jungle

In this revised edition of the original, ground-breaking Strategy Safari, Henry Mintzberg, described by Tom Peters as ‘perhaps the world’s premier management thinker’ and his equally maverick co-authors continue to blaze a trail through the jungle of strategy. This provocative, jargon-free and readable guide clearly sets out and critiques each of the ten major schools of strategic management to help you grasp what you really need to know. Whether you are an ambitious manager or a bewildered student, Strategy Safari is your indispensable guide to strategy.

Take the strategy safari – your business will thank you for it

SEE THE NEW COMPANION WEBSITE, INCLUDING INSTRUCTOR’S MANUAL, AT WWW.PEARSON-BOOKS.COM/STRATEGYSAFARI

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Financial Times Prentice Hall (July 20, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0273656368
• ISBN-13: 978-0273656364
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,011,689 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Invaluable Guide to Employing Strategic Management Themes, September 7, 2004

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Strategy Safari ('financial Times' S.) (Paperback)

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 for managers, consultants, professors and students. 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.

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good overview, September 22, 2005

By 

H. de Bruin (Netherlands) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Strategy Safari ('financial Times' S.) (Paperback)

This book gives you a good overview of the different strategic approaches developed in the past decades. Mintzberg et al. divided the well known strategic theories in ten themes. Though Mintzberg is rather sceptical about certain themes, all pros and cons of the themes are put in a nice and structured overview. (The one thing they could improve is treat Resource Based View as a seperate theme.)
This is the best book you can read to understand strategic management themes. It digs one level deeper than the standard introductory books and tells you about the scholars and the articles they initially wrote. Since it's nice and readable too, it's a must for students of strategic management and anyone else interested in the evolution of strategy as a field of study.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, well-written exposé on schools of strategic management, October 28, 2009

By 

Erik Gfesser (Lombard, IL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Strategy Safari: The Complete Guide Through the Wilds of Strategic Management (Paperback)

Authors Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel provide the oft-cited "The Blind Men and the Elephant" by John Godfrey Saxe as a backdrop to their discussion on the ten schools of management (Design, Planning, Positioning, Entrepreneurial, Cognitive, Learning, Power, Cultural, Environmental, and Configuration), because while at the outset they indicate that "we are the blind people and strategy formation is our elephant", since "everyone has grabbed hold of some part or other and 'railed on in utter ignorance' about the rest" because "no one has had the vision to see the entire beast", the authors end their discourse by showing that there is not necessarily one safari beast with which to contend, but multiple, although "we shall never find [the whole beast of strategy formation], never really see it all". Corresponding to each of these ten schools is a different view of the strategy process - strategy formation as a process of conception, strategy formation as a formal process, strategy formation as an analytical process, strategy formation as a visionary process, strategy formation as a mental process, strategy formation as an emergent process, strategy formation as a process of negotiation, strategy formation as a collective process, strategy formation as a reactive process, and strategy formation as a process of transformation. The chapter introductions to each of the schools provide superb historical information, and the last chapter discusses the evolution of the the ten schools and provides an excellent bulleted summary table that whimsically assigns different beasts to each school as well as easy-to-remember homilies such as "take us to your leader" for The Entrepreneurial School, "I'll see it when I believe it" for The Cognitive School, and "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" for The Learning School. In the opinion of this reviewer, the chapters on these three schools are also the best, even though the authors indicate that The Cognitive School is "characterized more by its potential than by its contribution. The central idea is valid - that the strategy-formation process is also fundamentally one of cognition, particularly in the attainment of strategies as concepts. But strategic management, in practice if not in theory, has yet to gain sufficiently from cognitive psychology. Or perhaps more accurately, cognitive psychology has yet to address adequately the questions of prime interest to strategic management, especially how concepts form in the mind of a strategist". The authors draw from many research sources (some readers may be interested in knowing that the bibliography is 18 pages long), including some of their past works, most notably Mintzberg, and their liberal use of well-placed sidebars and diagrams in the material is extremely effective in bringing these together. Their use of humor is also well received by this reviewer, especially when placed in the midst of some of the rather lengthy discussions that some readers new to his subject matter might otherwise receive as dry. For example, the chapter on The Design School starts with a quote by an anonymous manager about a Harvard MBA: "The damn guy just sits there waiting for a case study." This reviewer completely agrees that, in the words of the authors, this book makes sense of a field that often seems to make no sense. Well recommended to anyone in business, especially those struggling through the vast, sometimes confusing terrain of strategic management.