Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

Mintzbergs Strategy Safari is an excellent book for getting an overview on current schools of strategic management and for getting the ability to distinguish between them in reading about strategic management. Schools are portrayed with their most important premises and authors together with critical opinion at the end of each chapter. Great book!

I use this book as the main reference in my MBA lectures on Corporate Strategy.
The idea behind this is that Mintzberg puts strategy on perspective by showing ten diferent views of it instead of the standardized and biased tool-centered paradigm.
In a world of permanent change there is no substitute for a thinking decison maker. Mintzberg challenges the reader to think by presenting a multi-faceted view of the problem letting the reader decides which school is better for his problem.

Mintzberg evades the cake-recipe pattern that plagues business texts and opens room in the minds of the reader for a non-biased (or at least a less-biased) judgment.
The text is plenty of references so the reader can find his prefered authors and follow the path that call his attention or is focused on its particular problem or better suit its world-view.
Mintzberg excelled at creating a Tour de force on The field of Strategy. Even experts on the field will be forced to rethink its own concepts and paradigms.
You'll be challenged to think.

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 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.

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.

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.

This book provides an excellent introduction to the various schools of thought in the field of strategic management. It is more useful to the academician than the professional strategist, but nonetheless accurate, detailed and above all highly critical. A great addition to anyone's business library, and a must for anyone who wishes to take a management strategy course in the comfort of their own home.

The first and last chapters are worth the entire price of the book. Mintzberg is a master at revealing the assumptions and inconsistencies of conventional business school training. The explanation of the various "schools" of strategic management theory is more suited to academics or serious strategic management consultants, but provides one of the most concise and logical overviews of this eclectic field. As a PhD student studying business strategy, this book is better than any survey course in the topic.