Customer Reviews

Strategy Safari ('financial Times' S.)

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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 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.

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.

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.

Certainly one of the best books I ever read about Strategic Management! Mintzberg, Ahlstrand and Lampel succeeded in providing a comprehensive overview about strategic management.

Most text book on strategic management are focusing on a general introduction to Strategic Management, internal/external analysis, strategic options, strategy formation and the like. Mintzberg and colleagues turn this approach around and focus on "schools of thoughts" rather than the mentioned linear approach. This helped me to gain a much better overall understanding over the subject by seeing the different perspectives.

Furthermore the authors do not only "blindly" depict the major concepts and thinkers on strategy, but give to each school of thoughts their own advantages and disadvantages. Certainly one might not always agree on their comments but it makes the reader think and form his/her own opinion. I guess this is an indented outcome by the authors.

What I further liked is the detailed referencing to academic work. This gives the chance to dig even deeper into the topic if necessary respectively wished.

Last but not least a word of caution: For practitioners who look for a practical
guide and a quick-fix to their strategic problems might be disappointed.

I'm a participant of a master programme in enterprise architecture at inno.com and this book has given me a tremendous and fast insight in the evolution of strategic thinking.
I consider this a must read for everyone who wants to understand how different people look at strategic thinking over time.

It is not imposing anything but is excellent in helping you to get a personal view on how to see strategy.
A must have & a must read !

My appreciation of this book is beyond words. The book title states that it's "Your complete guide..." which I cant agree more. The elaborations, the short cases, the cartoons and the graphs are all excellent. IMHO, it's a must for any senior managers, consultants and academics (so their students dont have to go through the same torture I got from attending "Corporate Strategy" in my MBA studies, though the professors/lectures may want to keep this brilliant shortcut to themselves. In short, highly recommended!