Strategy Bites Back (1st Edition)

By Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joe Lampel
Publisher: Financial Times Prentice Hall
ISBN: 1405822031
Price: £19.99
Review by John Lucey

SWOTed by strategy models? Crunched by analysis? Strategy doesn’t have to be this way.
Strategy is really all about being different. Thinking about it shouldn’t make you reach for the snooze button, but in the world of strategy everybody has become so serious.
If that gets us better strategies, fine. But it doesn’t; we get worse ones - predictable, generic, uninspiring, dull. Strategy doesn’t only have to position; it also has to inspire. So an uninspiring strategy is really no strategy at all.

The most interesting and most successful companies are not boring. They have novel, creative, inspiring, sometimes even playful strategies. By taking the whole strategy business less seriously, they end up with more serious results - and have some fun in the bargain.

Strategy Bites Back invites you to encounter a diverse and unlikely set of voices with something sharp to say about strategy - from Michael Porter and Peter Drucker to Coco Channel’s ‘little black dress’. Taken together these perspectives will provide you with new and dramatically different angles from which to attack the world of strategy.

• Strategy as the Little Black Dress
• Forecasting Whoops
• Management and Magic
• The Soft Underbelly of Hard Data
• Jack Welch on Planning
• The Seven Deadly Sins of Strategic Planning
• Strategy from the Grassroots
• Strategy One Step at a Time
• Strategy and the Art of Seduction

This book is for everyone involved with strategy – manager, CEO, consultant, professor, student – anyone who wants to see strategy more broadly, more deeply and more playfully.

About the Authors
Henry Mintzberg normally bites back on issues of management, organisation, and corporate social irresponsibility (ie, shareholder value), as well as management education and strategy. (Managers not MBAs, with Berrett-Koehler in the US and Financial Times Prentice Hall in Europe was his last book.) He managed to get a PhD in management at MIT and has slipped about 130 articles past unsuspecting editors. He is the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University. 
Bruce Ahlstrand likes to prospect for strategy gems in unlikely places from the game of Texas Hold’em to the Greek tragedies. He is devoted to developing new and creative ways of teaching business strategy and has never met a case study that he liked. He has a DPhil from Oxford University and a MSc from the London School of Economics. Bruce is the author of The Quest for Productivity (Cambridge University Press) and co-author of Human Resource Management in the Multi-Divisional Company (Oxford University Press). He is a professor of management at Trent University in Ontario, Canada.

Joe Lampel began his career believing that strategy is the answer, but has recently concluded that it may be the answer to the wrong question. He first began to suspect this terrible truth during the long journey that produced the Strategy Safari. Further research, and numerous publications in journals that are well received in polite academic society, only served to confirm this belief. Joe was awarded a PhD in management by McGill University for good behaviour. He subsequently spent seven years at Stern School, NYU, trying to break into showbusiness. He currently resides at Cass Business School, City University London, an institution that happily accommodates his quest to find the answer to strategy’s unanswerable questions.