DiY strategy - I don't think so

A quick look in the business section of any book store or a search on-line will reveal an absolute multitude of books on strategic management.  Professor Richard Whittington (a prominent academic in the area of corporate strategy currently at the Saïd Business School of the University of Oxford) said it beautifully at the start of his 2001 book 'What is strategy and does it matter' when he observed that there is a basic implausibility about these books.  If they genuinely offer the secrets of strategic planning, something we pay top executives a great deal of money to perform, why so many books and why so cheap?

I can't help likening them to books on sex education where you can gain some of the basics but just by reading the books you will never become expert or even that good, you have to get a little experience...........  Yet the management guru industry and the popular presses churn them out by the score in the same vein as they churn out books on how to get fit the easy way.

Does this mean you shouldn't buy a book on strategy?  No, you should but the key message is that don't expect it, or let it, become your strategic planning bible.  Strategic planning is about thinking because every situation faced will be unique and the people facing it will have never been there before.  So the book can give you an idea about maybe how to start going about the process but it is more like a star on the horizon than a map to the future.

If you are going to buy a book, and I encourage you to do so, these authors are pretty good (in my humble opinion);

  • Henry Mintzberg - should be the most popular but Henry has never been drawn to become a popularist
  • Richard Whittington - Always provides a very balanced view
  • Bob de Wit and Ron Meyer - Have produced a good postgrad level text (though there are bound to be others)
  • Robert Grant - Always worth reading
This list is in no way meant to be exclusive as there are stacks of books on strategy I haven't read (I don't have the time to read them all even if I had the inclination!!!) but merely a good place to start.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mintzberg and Waters' strategy model

Image
It is interesting how some strategic management models come and go whilst other ones seem to survive the test of time.  In 1985 Henry Mintzberg (one of the leading strategic management thinkers) and James Waters developed a model to demonstrate how the strategy that is ultimately delivered is made of two parts; deliberate strategy (what the organisation set out to do) and emergent strategy (what happened on the way). In their original paper the model looks just a little clunky, word processing not as it is today, but very recognisable for all scholars and practitioners. And although the concept of the model hasn't changed at all, it does look a little funkier with a 'lick of paint'. The model still communicates with a simplicity that belies the revolutionary nature of what it was at the time.  It looks obvious with hindsight that of course we haven't got a crystal ball and the world changes so where we end up is a combination of where we were heade...
Read more

Double Hermeneutic

I came across this term (pronounced 'her men you tic') in my strategic management PhD travels and was quite intrigued by it as it's both simple (despite its name) and very enlightening.  Hopefully I'll do the simple part justice here!!!! It was coined by  Anthony Giddens , a famous British sociologist, and it reveals a major difference in the way we should (stress on the should) theorise about the natural world versus our social world and of particular interest to me, theories about how we should manage people. In essence, a theory about our natural world has no impact on the natural world which remains the same no matter what we think.  For example it was previously thought that the world was flat (and yes there are some of you still out there) but that didn't change the shape of the earth which remained a sphere (oh yes it is).  This is a single hermeneutic. However in the social sciences this isn't the case and, if for example...
Read more

If planning is everything, Maybe its nothing.

A blog back on my subject area, strategic planning or strategic management to use the correct term for the academic field. I have been reading an interesting article entitled 'If planning is everything, Maybe its nothing' written back in 1973 by Aaron Wildavsky.  It is almost a fore runner to one of the largest debates in strategic management, whether strategy should be planned and deliberate or it emerges naturally as part of general management activities. The article makes some very interesting points but it does read a little gloomily as though Mr Wildavsky hasn't got a lot of time for planners in general.  His particular interest is planning in the 3rd world (although it wasn't called the 3rd world then) and he observes that in amongst all the money poured into formal plans and planning, the results have been pretty disappointing. It raises another interesting argument/point and that is the difference between the plan and the outcomes.  He appears to be a...
Read more