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

By Henry Mintzberg

Book overview

Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through The Wilds of Strategic Management by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel is an overview of the full field of academic and business studies of strategy, based on a previous lecture series by Mintzberg.

In addition to an overview of existing meta-theories of strategy, including the "five Ps" (strategy as plan, ploy, pattern, perspective, position), the authors find ten separate schools of strategy, which are:

The environmental school
The cognitive school
The entrepreneurial school
The power school
The positioning school
The cultural school
The planning school
The learning (or emergent) school
The design school
The configuration (or transformation) school

The underlying thesis of the book is that the 'strategy beast' is not any one of these, but that each school represents a partial picture of what strategy is. Academics may find it convenient to examine parts of strategy, assert the authors, but managers need to be able to work with the entire, living beast.

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

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

Book overview

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

1. The main role of strategy is to chart the course of an organization in order for it to sail cohesively through its environment.

2.Creativity thrives on inconsistency-by finding new combinations of hitherto separate phenomena.

3.The strategy must not present mutually inconsistent goals and policies.

4.The strategy must represent an adaptive response to the external environment and to the critical changes occurring within it.

5.The strategy must provide for the creation and/or maintenance of a competitive advantage in the selected area of activity.

6.When the world changes, managers need to share some common view of the new world. Otherwise, decentralized strategic decisions will result in management anarchy.

7.Effective strategy making connects acting to thinking which in turn connects implementation to formulation. We think in order to act, to be sure, but we also act in order to think.

8.To be successful, a company should have a portfolio of products with different growth rates and different market shares. The portfolio composition is a function of the balance between cash flows.

9.In one sense, the entrepreneurial school, like the positioning school, grew out of economics. The entrepreneur figures prominently in neoclassical economic theory.

10.As planning faltered, vision arose. The great leader-meaning some- I one with a vision-would come and save the organization.

11.. . . successful managers who operate with logical incrementalism build the seeds of understanding, identity, and commitment into the very processes that create their strategies.

12.The CEO formulates strategies through a conscious, controlled process of thought, much as tomatoes are cultivated in a hothouse.

13.Thus strategic intent sets general direction, defines emerging market opportunities, and provides a rallying cry for employees. Boisot sees particular value in this concept in situations of environmental uncertainty.

14.Besides the lack of strategies and the unlearning of good strategies, learning in an incremental way can also encourage the emergence of strategies that no one ever wanted, let alone intended.

15.Some organizations face perpetual novelty. In other words, their environments are dynamic and unpredictable, which makes it difficult to converge on a clear strategy at all.

16.If strategy making can be a process of planning and analysis, cognition and learning, so too can it be one of bargaining and compromise among conflicting individuals, groups, and coalitions.

17.Organizations resolve conflict among goals, in part, by attending to different goals at different times.

18.The organization is able to make decisions but it cannot seem to make strategies.

19.Yet we believe that strategies can and do emerge from political processes. Sometimes a single decision arrived at politically can set a precedent and thereby establish a pattern.

20.Coalition leaders often have the strongest motivation for rejecting the sponsored strategy. It takes a high degree of motivation to form and lead a coalition. . . . Thus, removing the leader often can be effective in overcoming coalition opposition.

21.The first step in the construction of strategic programs for stakeholder groups is the analysis of behavior. . . . There are at least three categories of behavior for any stakeholder grouv on each issue...

22.The second task in beginning the construction of strategic programs for stakeholders is to build a logical explanation for the stakeholder's behavior.

23.Because the most effective way of controlling the power of external actors is to control the behavior of those actors, there has grown up an interesting literature on how organizations maneuver strategically to attain their objectives.

24.As companies extended their relationships among themselves, both in breadth and especially in depth, researchers took notice, and a network model was developed .-which Hakansson and Snehota [1989:190]

25.Networks, alliances, collective strategies, outsourcing-all of this taken together is making it increasingly more difficult to figure out where one organization ends and another begins.

26.Collaboration is competition in a different form. Successful companies never forget that their new partners may be out to disarm them. They enter alliances with clear strategic objectives, and they also understand how their partners' objectives will

27.Strategy formation is shaped by power and politics, whether as a process inside the organization or as the behavior of the organization it- self in its external environment.

28. The strategies that may result fiom such a process tend to be emergent, and take the form ofpositions and ploys more than perspectives.

29.Macro power sees the organization as promoting its own welfare by controlling or cooperating with other organizations. through the use of strategic maneuvering as well as collective strategies in various kinds of networks and alliances.

30.Always be objective, which means to treat people as objects (in particular, hire and fire employees the way you buy and sell machines-everything is a "portfolio").

31.Now leadership as well as organization becomes subordinate to the external environment. Indeed, as we have moved through the various schools, the power of the central strategist has gradually diminished.

32.Now leadership as well as organization becomes subordinate to the external environment. Indeed, as we have moved through the various schools, the power of the central strategist has gradually diminished.

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