Strategy Safari – Book review
The other day I came across Strategy Safari by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel. I read it for a strategic course during my years in Rajk. I thought I would write a nice review to the case study blog so I began to flip it through. It is interesting how much five years of university and a year of work can change on one’s perspective, while flipping the pages I realized that I was reading the entire book from the beginning.
Even the authors and the background story of the book are impressive. Henry Mintzberg is one of the greatest strategic thinkers of our time, he is by the way the recipient of the Hebert Simon award (2006) of the Rajk László College for Advanced Studies. Bruce Ahlstrand asked Mintzberg after a lecture at Trent University: what if they were to write a book on the schools of strategy, sort of a safari, and they took in their good friend Professor Joseph Lampel as a third author.
The authors invite the reader on a strategy safari in their book. On an adventurous journey where we can see interesting formations from different perspectives. During the journey the authors go over the main paradigms of the different strategic schools of thought (1. Design, 2. Planning, 3. Positioning, 4. Entrepreneurial, 5. Cognitive, 6. Learning, 7. Political, 8. Cultural, 9. Environmental and 10. Configurational). The authors do not get stuck with the main messages but take them apart into tiny pieces, highlighting the weaknesses of certain assumptions and the limits of particular models.
The book keeps emphasizing that strategy is not an easily definable notion; its content constantly depends on the perspective of the investigation and the changing environmental factors. Hence there is no general strategy definition, still after reading the book we get a more complex picture on its content and nature.