📖 Strategy Bites Back

2004. Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, and Joseph Lampel

Six years previous to this book, these three university colleagues co-authored Strategy Safari (1998), and later went for a third round together with Management? It’s Not What You Think! (2010).

Their first book Strategy Safari was—to use their own words—“a serious book on strategy, albeit with a not-so-serious title” in which they “set out to order and review the serious literature on strategy”. In it they tried to synthesise the entire history and evolution of strategy, which they then organised into ten schools of thought. The book was a big success and is considered a classic.

This book however is very different. It’s a much more lighthearted approach, attempting to bring some humour to a discipline to known for being “awfully dull and boring”, where “everybody is so serious” and “straighter than their charts”. Because “at the end of the day, strategy doesn’t only have to position, it also has to inspire”.

“This book has a serious intention; to take strategy less seriously and so promote better strategies.”

Strategy Bites Back is a collection of short ‘bytes’ from an array of contributors. Most are extracts from texts published previously, but some original, and all from a wide span of time. It also includes poems, quotes and cartoons to help keep the playful tone.

Like in Strategy Safari the authors group together pieces relating to similar schools of thought, because “only when you put them together—see them in juxtaposition and combine them in application—do they come usefully alive.”

There are many great extracts from an esteemed and colourful list of contributors (“from Mozart to Coco Chanel”). Considering I subscribe most to what the authors referred to in Strategy Safari as The learning School of strategy, I most enjoyed the corresponding chapter here, entitled ‘Strategy a step at a time’. It includes bytes like the conflicting stories of how intentional Honda’s strategy was for breaking the US motorcycle industry, Mintzberg’s preference for strategies to be grown like weeds, and the ever reliable Gary Hamel talking about ‘Strategies that learn’.

As someone making a concerted effort to read as many strategy books as possible, I concur that most of them are overwhelmingly dull. And so while this may not have been the most informative book I have read, it was a welcomed departure from the rest of the pack.