"Henry Mintzberg is perhaps the world's premier management thinker" a Carlsberg-style endorsement of the author from Tom Peters, management guru

Henry Mintzberg is one of today’s best-known and most controversial management thinkers. Currently Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, he is always interesting and usually controversial and holds the management and strategy communities in thrall. He claims to spend his public life dealing with organizations, and his private life escaping from them.

Bruce Ahlstrand likes to prospect for strategy gems in unlikely places - from the game of Texas Hold’em to the Greek tragedies. He has a D.Phil. from Oxford University and a M.Sc. from the London School of Economics. Bruce is the author is currently 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 first edition of 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

Contents

Acknowledgements / ix

Embarkation / xi

1 ‘And over here, ladies and gentlemen: the strategic management beast

Why ten?

A field review

Five Ps for strategy

Strategies for better and for worse

Strategic management as an academic discipline

2 The design school: strategy formation as a process of conception

Origins of the design school

The basic design school model

Premises of the design school

Critique of the design school

The design school: contexts and contributions

3 The planning school: strategy formation as a formal process

The basic strategic planning model

Sorting out the hierarchies

Premises of the planning school

Some more recent developments

Planning’s unplanned troubles

The fallacies of strategic planning

The context and contribution of the planning school

4 The positioning school: strategy formation as an analytical process

Enter Porter

Premises of the positioning school

The first wave: origins in the military maxims

The second wave: the search for consulting imperatives

The third wave: the development of empirical propositions

Critique of the positioning school

Contribution and context of the positioning school

5 The entrepreneurial school: strategy formation as a visionary process

Origins in economics

The literature of the entrepreneurial school

Visionary leadership

Premises of the entrepreneurial school

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