Product Description

"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."

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83561 in Books
• Published on: 1998
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

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)

---

Customer Reviews

The essential guide to senior management's biggest challenge
When senior managers and executives discuss strategy, the results are often unhelpful or unenlightening. This is bad enough in a single company, but in a merger or formal partnership it can quickly result in energy sapping discussions which lead nowhere.

One of the main reasons is that there are so many deeply held views of what strategy is.

If you are a senior manager and have ever faced such a situation, then this book should be at the top of your list.

Authoritative but entertaining, it overviews and critiques the ten schools of strategic thinking which are common in the business world today. Read once through quickly, it will open your eyes to the key thoughts and terminology which characterise each school - in turn explaining why otherwise flexible colleagues can become intransigent over the meaning of a single word.

A more careful rereading will enable you to gain an overview of how different kinds of strategy relate to each other, when one school is preferable to another, and the pitfalls of following any one school slavishly.

At a further level, this book carefully refers by page number to the key texts in each of the schools. It therefore becomes an extended bibliographic study guide to a much deeper immersion in underlying theory.

Mintzberg and his co-authors have worked very hard to keep this text lucid and relatively short. It is nonetheless detailed and rewarding. If you are not sure about this book, there is a summary paper in the FT's Mastering Strategy, which should help to make up your mind.

Strategic schools summed up in one easy, slim volume
I admit that I started reading this as a fan of Mintzberg's easy to read and sometimes funny style. As a business school student, the schools of strategy were not hanging together for me. One text would present a number of broad schools, another would sub-divide them, and of course they would both call some of them by different names. This book starts by introducing the different schools and how they came about, then discusses each in turn, then (hallelujah!) provides a really clear table at the back of the book showing how they differ. It has made my studies easier, though I admit to bias and being a fan to start with.

MBA in a volume
If like me you are doing your MBA, this is one of two essential books (the other being the book of MBA models.) This is a potted history of strategic thinking, not sufficient on its own to develop your dissertation according to one school of thought, but an excellent starter for ten and a superb context in which to place the evolution of corporate strategy.