Iconoclasts having too much fun

Citation

Abraham, S. (2006), "Iconoclasts having too much fun", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 34 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2006.26134aae.001

Iconoclasts having too much fun

Iconoclasts having too much fun

Strategy Bites Back: It Is Far More, and Less, than You Ever ImaginedHenry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph LampelPearson Prentice-Hall, 2005

The title of this book is provocative and Henry Mintzberg is a noted contrarian, so I confess to having looked forward to reading the irreverent revelations and insights that he and his colleagues have assembled in this collection of short articles. Indeed, the book mostly lived up to my expectations and often proved surprising. Mintzberg and his co-authors offer many different ways of imagining strategy, some of which are a lot of fun, especially for veterans of corporate strategy making. However, for a novice wanting to learn more about strategy, a number of the articles may be more puzzling than enlightening.

The introduction, also called “Strategy for Fun,” explains the motivation the authors had for assembling the book. Strategy, they say, can be “awfully boring,” and strategists themselves are too serious. The most interesting companies, they assert, 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.” So the authors set about to create a book that takes strategy less seriously, but at the same time promotes better strategies. They want readers to enjoy reading a strategy book for a change. In their words, “isn’t it time for strategy to bite back?”

The book is a compendium of very short articles – by design no longer than three pages – called “bytes,” organized into nine chapters (nine articles did exceed this design limit, five by Mintzberg). The chapters have fun titles like “Swoted by Strategy,” “Strategy Carefully,” and “Strategy with the Gloves Off and the Halo On.” The brevity of the articles, and the tone, made for very easy reading. In fact, it’s the kind of book one can dip into occasionally – between meetings, on a trip, or as temporary relief from “boring” strategic analysis. The introductions to each chapter are lighthearted and useful.

However, the articles themselves are a mixed bag in terms of content and quality. Some taught me something new about strategy or strategic thinking, or made their point in a lucid or memorable way. For example, Jeanne Liedtka’s article likened strategy to Coco Chanel’s classic little black dress, with the advice to keep strategy simple, keep it elegant, and make it transformative. In another article, she compares strategy to the art of seduction: “successful strategies are compelling and persuasive in the eye of the beholder – put more vividly, they are seductive. The real power of any strategy is the opportunity it affords to entice people into sharing an image of the future.”

Another gem of an article was Gordon Siu’s analogy about the strategies of bees and flies. Siu explains: place a few bees and flies in an open glass bottle positioned horizontally with its closed end to the light. Bees think their exit should be toward the light, and relentlessly (rigidly) pursue that strategy, in vain; flies, on the other hand, having neither brains nor strategy, flutter wildly all over the place (experiment) and stumble on the opening and escape. His moral: we need more flies making strategy and fewer bees, fitting with what Mintzberg has long espoused, that strategy really evolves and isn’t created “by design.” However, as a veteran of many strategy making sessions, I can attest that this notion may be true in some cases, but it simply isn’t true all the time.

Some articles are intended to be funny and succeed. For example, Joe Lampel does a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the Tower of Babel. John Kay, with tongue in cheek, defines strategy in several ways, one meaning “expensive,” as in “strategy consultant.” And an article by Martin Gimpl and Stephen Dakin written in 1984 contends that “management’s enchantment with the magical rites of long-range planning, forecasting, and several other future-oriented techniques is a manifestation of anxiety-relieving superstitious behavior.” James Brooke’s article on the toilet wars in Japan recounts innovation and competition taken to the extreme, as in the toilet becoming a home health-measuring center, calculating “weight, fat, blood pressure, heart beat, urine sugar, albumin, and blood in urine.” And Lucy Kellaway’s question at the end of the book that asks which is harder – to lose weight or make money – has a surprise conclusion.

The book also offers many articles that help the reader understand strategy or strategy making better. These include Michael Porter’s view that the CEO has to be the chief strategist, Jack Welch’s insistence on hearing first-hand the thinking and passion that went into a business unit’s planning before seeing its plan, and Ian Wilson’s exposition of the seven deadly sins of planning. Also on this list are Mintzberg’s reminder of the pitfalls of hard data and the usefulness of soft data, and his article on managing “quietly,” reflecting on virtues of caring, inspiring, wisdom, trust, dedication, and judgment. Others deserving mention are Laurence Wilkinson’s summary of scenario planning, Karl Weick’s advice for managers that “it is what they do, not what they plan, that explains their success.” He continues this theme in another gem called “Talk the Walk,” where he suggests that people walk first in order to find out what is worth talking about – act in order to think, do in order to learn. Joe Lampel’s piece about what his mother taught him about strategy is memorable, as is Gary Hamel’s reminder that the more a company engages in experimentation, the faster it can understand precisely which strategies are likely to work.

One problem with the book is that Mintzberg remains overly fond of his older articles, some of which muddy the strategy waters. For example, his 1987 article on the “Five Ps for Strategy” propounds that strategy is a plan, a ploy, a pattern, a position, and a perspective. And in another article he claims that “strategies are to organizations what blinders are to horses,” meaning that strategies keep organizations “going in a straight line, but impede the use of peripheral vision.” Another provocative piece from his 1994 book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, talks about planning’s inflexibility; in it is this condemnation, “strategic planning has more often ruined strategic thinking.” All of us know that strategy has come a long way since then, and that strategic thinking is what drives good strategic planning – one doesn’t exist without the other. Editing out those articles that fuel confusion would have improved the book.

In their introduction to the final short chapter, the authors say, in part:

Creating strategy is judgmental designing, intuitive visioning, and emergent learning; it requires personal thinking and social interacting, cooperative as well as conflictive; it can include analyzing before and programming after as well as imagining during.

Providing any answer short of this would be doing you a disservice because when it comes to strategy there are no easy answers. Except, of course, to make sure you understand deeply what you are strategizing about, that you act engagingly, responsively, and responsibly, and that you have courage to see with your own eyes, think with your own brain, and act with your own heart.

Encouraging that has been the purpose of publishing this collection of ideas (pp. 276-7).

For the most part, the book achieves that purpose. The fun the authors had in compiling the book spills over to the reader and makes the book engaging. I enjoyed much of this collection, which provides enough edification for the veteran and the novice to make it worth recommending.

Stan AbrahamProfessor of strategy and entrepreneurship at Cal Poly Pomona and a contributing editor of Strategy & Leadership (scabraham@csupomona.edu).