Strategy Bites Back

Strategy can be awfully boring. The consultants can be straigther than their charts, the planners more predictable than their processes. Everybody is so serious.

If that gets us better strategies, fine. But it doesn't; we get worse ones – predictable, generic, 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 we know 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 into the bargain.

Strategy Bites Back invites you to encounter an unlikely set of voices with something sharp to say about strategy – from Mozart to Coco Chanel's “little black dress”. These perspectives will provide you with new and dramatically different angles from which to attack the world of strategy.

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

If we bring a little imagination back into the making of strategy, our strategies can take us to a different place. So here's to more playful and incisive strategies. It's time for strategy to bite back.

• Chapter 1 – What's In A Word?
• Introduction
• What's In A Buzzword?
  Lucy Kellaway
• “Eenie, Meenie, Minie, Mo…”
  The Economist
• What Is Strategy?
  John Kay
• Five Ps for Strategy
  Henry Mintzberg
• Beware of Strategy
  A. Inkpen and N. Choudhury
  Henry Mintzberg
• Are Strategies Real Things?
  Bruce Ahlstrand and Henry Mintzberg
• Chapter 2 – SWOTed by Strategy
• Introduction
• The Other Tower of Babel
  Joseph Lampel
• Strategy as a “Little Black Dress”
  Jeanne Liedtka
• The CEO as Strategist
  Michael Porter
• The Manager as Orchestra Conductor?
• The Tortoise and the Hare: A Fable for Senior Executives
  John Kay
• Jack's Turn
  Henry Mintzberg
• Chapter 3 – Strategy Carefully
• Introduction
• The Revolution in Strategic Planning
  John Byrne
• Jack Welch on Planning
• The Seven Deadly Sins of Planning
  Ian Wilson
• Planning in Case
  Laurence Wilkinson
• Forecasting: Whoops!
• Plans in Case You Are Stuck
  Karl Weick
• The Creation
• How to Plan a Strategy
  Henry Mintzberg
• Speech at the Second Plenary Session of the Eight Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (November 15, 1956)
  Mao Tse Tung
• Planning and Flexibility
  Henry Mintzberg
• Management and Magic
  Martin L.Gimpl and Stephen R. Dakin
• Chapter 4 – Figuring Strategy
• Introduction
• Launching Strategy
  Henry Mintzberg
• Positioning the Derri&egrave";"re: Toilet Nirvana
  James Brooke
• The Soft Underbelly of Hard Data
  Henry Mintzberg
• The Glory of Numbers
• Reversing the Images of BCG's Growth/Share Matrix
  John Seeger
• Chapter 5 – A Vision of Strategy
• Introduction
• To See or Not to See
• Imaging Strategy
  Henry Mintzberg and Frances Westley
• Strategic Thinking as “Seeing”
  Henry Mintzberg
• Seeing a Symphony
  Mozart
• The Problem with Problems
  Smullyan
• “Marketing Myopia” Myopia
  Henry Mintzberg
• Recognizing the CEO as Artist
  Patricia Pitcher
• Reflections of an Entrepreneur
  Richard Branson
• Entrepreneurship and Planning
  Amar Bhide
• Managing Quietly
  Henry Mintzberg
• What My Mother Taught Me About Strategy
  Joseph Lampel
• Chapter 6 – Inside the Strategist's Head
• Introduction
• Biases and Limitations of Judgment: Humans
  Spyros G. Makridakis
• Biases and Limitations of Judgement: Animals
• Everything I Need to Know About Strategy I Learned at the National Zoo
  Jeanne Liedtka
• The Man vs. the Machine
  Charles Krauthammer
• Think Like a Grandmaster
  G.M. Alexander Kotov
• The Emperor's New Suit
  Hans Christian Andersen
• Management Expert Gary Hamel Talks With Enron's ken Lay About What It's Like to Launch a New Strategy in the Real World
  Gary Hamel
• Chapter 7 – Strategy A Step At A Time
• Introduction
• Good Managers Don't Make Policy Decisions
  H. Edward Wrapp
• Backing Into A Brilliant Strategy: Reports on Honda
• Ruminations on Honda
  Richard Rumelt
• Bees and Flies Making Strategy
  Gordon Siu
• Growing Strategies: Two Ways
  Henry Mintzberg
• Strategies That Learn
  Gary Hamel
• Strategy Up and Down
  John Kotter";" Michael Beer
• Strategy as Destiny
  Harvey Schachter
• Talk the Walk
  Karl Weick
• How to Fight the Strategic Wars
  Quotes from Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington
• Looking a Few Steps Back
• The Calf Path
  Sam Walter Foss
• Chapter 8 – Strategy With the Gloves Off and the Halo On
• Introduction
• Chess in the Real World
  Felix Holt
• Bees in the Real World
  Edward O. Wilson
• Laws of Power
  Robert Greene and Joost Elffers
• Planning as Public Relations
  Heny Mintzberg
• Brinkmanship in Business
  Bruce Henderson
• Strategy and the Art of Seduction
  Jeanne Liedtka
• Strategy is Culture is Strategy
  Karl Weick
• Five Easy Steps to Destroying a Rich Culture (Any One Will Do)
  Henry Mintzberg
• How Destructive Cultures Develop
  Tommy Wiseman
• Chapter 9 – Final Food for Thought
• Introduction
• Be Your Body's Boss
  Lucy Kellaway
• Recipes for Cooking Strategy

This is pure genius at work. I bow my head in awe. This is not recommended reading, this is the kind of book you MUST read if you're into strategy. Cut down on Porter, Kay, Drucker, etc., and read this instead! After reading this, you can re-visit the old schools and see the world in a different light. In short, I am ecstatic. You'll pry this book from my dead hands (if you can get it away from me even then…).

Read it, or you'll miss a very funny book (if you don't laugh out load a number of times, you lack all sense of humour) as well as a very thought-provoking book with a very important message, which even manages to make strategy fun (you'll understand more after having read the book). Together with Strategy Safari (by the same authors) and Johnson & Scholes books, this should be enough to get anyone to understand and work with strategy.

This has to be one of this decades most important/influential books, so I'll recommend it warmly.