Capítulo 1
The Strategy Safari: Navigating the Wilderness of Strategic Management
When Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, and Joseph Lampel published "Strategy Safari" in 1998, they transformed how we understand organizational strategy. The book quickly became a business classic, praised by The Financial Times as "a serious, rather than populist, guide to strategy." What makes this work exceptional isn't just its comprehensive analysis of strategic management theories, but its refreshing metaphor: strategy as a safari through different territories, each with its own distinctive beasts. Rather than presenting one definitive approach to strategy, the authors invite readers on an intellectual expedition through ten "schools of thought," demonstrating how each perspective offers valuable-yet incomplete-insights into the complex world of strategic management. As Peter Drucker once noted after reading the book, "I'm not sure there are ten schools of strategy, but these authors have certainly identified the key perspectives that have shaped our understanding of what strategy really means."
Capítulo 2
Strategy's Ten Schools: The Landscape of Strategic Thought
Strategy formation is a complex process that has been viewed through many different lenses. Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel identify ten distinct schools of thought, each with its own perspective on how strategies form. These schools fall into three groups: prescriptive schools focused on how strategies should be formulated (design, planning, positioning); descriptive schools examining how strategies actually emerge (entrepreneurial, cognitive, learning, power, cultural, environmental); and a final integrative approach (configuration).
This framework reflects psychologist George Miller's observation that humans can process about seven (plus or minus two) chunks of information-making ten schools an appropriate number for comprehension. Each school offers a narrow but valuable view, much like the blind men examining different parts of an elephant in the ancient parable. To understand strategy formation completely requires appreciating all perspectives while recognizing that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
The authors approach this vast literature as a "field review" rather than an exhaustive academic survey, highlighting key works that shaped each perspective. They note a concerning tendency in management literature to chase the latest trends while ignoring foundational works, arguing that "we ignore past work at our own peril" and that time, like aging wine in barrels, reveals what is truly excellent in strategic management thinking.
Capítulo 3
The Five Ps: Understanding Strategy's Multiple Meanings
Rather than offering a single definition of strategy, the authors present five complementary perspectives that collectively provide a comprehensive framework for understanding strategic thinking. Strategy can manifest as a plan (looking forward), a pattern (consistency in behavior over time), a position (locating specific products in specific markets), a perspective (an organization's fundamental way of doing things), or a ploy (a specific maneuver to outwit competitors).
As a plan, strategy represents a consciously intended course of action, like Apple's deliberate move into services to complement its hardware business. As a pattern, it emerges from consistent behaviors, such as 3M's long-standing commitment to innovation and allowing employees to spend 15% of their time on creative projects. When viewed as a position, strategy focuses on where organizations place themselves in the competitive landscape - consider how Tesla positioned itself in the luxury segment before moving downstream. The perspective view emphasizes organizational culture and collective thinking, exemplified by Google's innovative mindset or Toyota's kaizen philosophy. Finally, as a ploy, strategy can involve tactical moves designed to outmaneuver competitors, such as when a company announces expansion plans to deter competitors from entering a market.
The distinction between strategy as plan and pattern leads to important concepts of intended versus realized strategies. When intentions are fully realized, we have deliberate strategies - like Microsoft's planned expansion into cloud computing. Unrealized intentions become abandoned strategies, such as Google's withdrawal from the Chinese search market. Patterns that emerge without explicit intention are emergent strategies, illustrated by Honda's unexpected success in the small motorcycle market in America. In practice, most successful strategies combine deliberate and emergent elements - "to exercise control while fostering learning." Southwest Airlines' low-cost strategy, for instance, began as a necessity but evolved into a deliberate competitive advantage.
These definitions relate differently to the ten schools of strategic thought, each emphasizing different aspects of strategy formation. The planning school naturally gravitates toward strategy as plan, focusing on formal processes and detailed roadmaps. The positioning school, influenced by Porter's frameworks, emphasizes strategy as position, analyzing industry structure and competitive advantage. The entrepreneurial school views strategy as perspective, highlighting vision and intuition. The learning school embraces strategy as pattern, recognizing that strategies often emerge through experimentation and adaptation. The power school frequently examines strategy as ploy, focusing on negotiation and competitive maneuvering. Understanding these multiple meanings and their relationship to different schools of thought provides a richer, more nuanced approach to strategic management and helps explain why different organizations and situations may require different approaches to strategy formation.
Capítulo 4
The Design School: Finding Strategic Fit
The design school represents the most influential view of strategy formation, with its concepts forming the bedrock of strategy courses worldwide. Its famous SWOT analysis-assessing organizational Strengths and Weaknesses against environmental Opportunities and Threats-has filled countless blackboards and presentations, from Fortune 500 boardrooms to startup planning sessions. This framework has become so ubiquitous that it's often considered synonymous with strategic planning itself.
This approach, pioneered at Harvard Business School in the 1960s by Kenneth Andrews and others, proposes strategy as finding "fit" between internal capabilities and external possibilities. "Establish fit" is its motto, emphasizing the need for organizations to align their internal competencies with external market opportunities. The model presents strategy formation as a deliberate process of conscious thought where the CEO acts as the chief strategist and architect of organizational direction. According to this school, strategies should be uniquely designed for each specific situation, remain simple enough for everyone from executives to frontline workers to understand, and be fully formulated before implementation begins.
The design school's methodology typically follows a clear sequence: external and internal appraisal, followed by strategy creation, evaluation, and choice, culminating in implementation. This systematic approach has proven particularly effective in stable environments where competitive conditions remain relatively constant and organizations can take time to analyze and plan their moves carefully.
However, this approach suffers from significant limitations that become particularly apparent in today's fast-moving business environment. By promoting thought independent of action, it assumes organizations can accurately assess strengths and weaknesses through analysis alone, when these can only truly be discovered through testing and experience in the marketplace. The famous dictum that "structure follows strategy," while logical in theory, ignores how existing organizational capabilities, culture, and infrastructure fundamentally constrain strategic options.
Most problematically, the separation of formulation from implementation creates an artificial divide between thinking and acting that works well in classrooms but often fails in practice. Modern strategists need direct engagement with products, customers, and market dynamics to develop effective strategies. Companies like Toyota and Honda have demonstrated that strategy often emerges from ground-level experimentation and learning rather than top-down analysis alone. The design school's emphasis on formal planning can also lead to analysis paralysis, where organizations spend excessive time planning rather than adapting to rapidly changing market conditions.
Despite these limitations, the design school's core insight about the importance of aligning organizational capabilities with market opportunities remains valuable, particularly when combined with more dynamic and iterative approaches to strategy development.
Capítulo 5
The Planning School: Programming Strategic Vision
The planning school emerged alongside the design school but took a dramatically different approach. While accepting most design school premises, it prescribed a highly formal, almost mechanically programmed execution. The simple, informal design school model became an elaborated sequence of steps with extensive checklists and techniques.
This approach dominated the 1970s when thousands of articles extolled formal strategic planning as something modern and progressive. Planning models typically feature elaborate diagrams showing the overall flow, with extensive procedures for quantifying goals, forecasting external factors, evaluating strategic options, and operationalizing strategies into detailed hierarchical plans.
However, strategic planning fell from grace in the early 1980s when many companies scaled back their planning activities. Most dramatically, Jack Welch dismantled General Electric's planning system, allowing division leaders to "gain ownership" of their businesses from what one executive called "an isolated bureaucracy" of planners. Evidence mounted against planning's effectiveness, with numerous studies failing to prove its value.
The fundamental fallacy of strategic planning is that analysis cannot produce synthesis. Planning can support strategy by providing inputs or formalizing consequences, but it can never substitute for the creative process of strategy formation itself. As the authors note, "strategic planning" is ultimately an oxymoron-it should have been called "strategic programming," a process to formalize strategies developed through other means.
Capítulo 6
The Positioning School: Finding Your Place in the Market
In the early 1980s, economics blew through strategic management, adding substance to the prescriptive literature. The positioning school emphasized strategies themselves and their specific content, giving scholars and consultants something substantial to study and prescribe-specific strategies for specific contexts.
Michael Porter's 1980 book "Competitive Strategy" crystallized this movement, drawing together disenchantment with previous schools and the need for substance. Porter identified five forces that shape industry competition: threat of new entrants, bargaining power of suppliers, bargaining power of customers, threat of substitute products, and intensity of rivalry among competitors. He argued that firms must choose between just two competitive advantages-low cost or differentiation-combined with market scope to produce four generic strategies.
The positioning school's emphasis on analysis and calculation has reduced its role from formulating strategy to conducting strategic analyses in support of the strategy process. Its primary contribution has been adding content to the planning school while shifting the planner's role to analyst.
However, this approach shows a strong bias toward traditional big business in mature industries where market power is greatest and hard data most available. It pays little attention to small firms, fragmented industries, or unstable conditions. By focusing on generic positions rather than unique perspectives, it draws companies toward copycat behaviors and benchmarking rather than innovation. Both managers and researchers become codifiers of past patterns instead of inventors of the future.
Capítulo 7
The Entrepreneurial School: Vision and Leadership
The entrepreneurial school focuses exclusively on the single leader and stresses intuition, judgment, wisdom, experience, and insight. Strategy becomes perspective, associated with vision and direction. The organization becomes responsive to the leader's dictates, while the environment becomes terrain the leader maneuvers within.
The central concept is vision-a mental representation of strategy in the leader's mind that serves as both inspiration and guidance. This vision is often more image than articulated plan, making it flexible and adaptable. Entrepreneurial strategy is thus both deliberate in its broad direction and emergent in its details, allowing adaptation along the way.
Research shows entrepreneurs tend toward overconfidence and positive categorization of scenarios-seeing strengths where others see weaknesses. This cognitive bias may actually be beneficial for rapid decision-making when opportunities present limited windows for action.
As organizations grow larger, the leader's role evolves from single-handedly directing operations to developing and articulating vision. A true vision distinguishes an organization as unique-something you can see in your mind's eye and, as Warren Bennis noted, "if it's really a vision, you'll never forget it."
The entrepreneurial approach highlights strategy's proactive nature and the critical role of personalized leadership and vision, especially valuable for organizations in their early stages. However, it suffers from treating strategy as wrapped in a single individual's behavior while providing little insight into the actual cognitive process.
Capítulo 8
The Cognitive School: Strategy in the Mind
The cognitive school seeks to understand strategy formation by probing into the strategist's mind, drawing heavily on cognitive psychology and neuroscience. It has two distinct wings: a positivistic wing that treats knowledge processing as an effort to produce objective vision (though inevitably distorted by cognitive limitations), and a subjective wing that sees strategy as interpretation, where cognition actually creates rather than recreates the world around us.
Building on Herbert Simon's groundbreaking work on bounded rationality, researchers have identified numerous judgmental biases that affect strategists' decision-making processes. Confirmation bias leads managers to seek information that confirms existing beliefs while dismissing contradictory evidence. Recency effects cause overemphasis on recent events at the expense of historical patterns. Illusory correlations result in seeing false patterns in random data, while wishful thinking distorts probability estimates in favor of desired outcomes. Other common biases include overconfidence in predictions, anchoring to initial reference points, and the tendency to escalate commitment to failing courses of action.
The constructionist perspective within this school goes further, holding that the mind doesn't just decode the external world but actively constructs it through mental models, frameworks, and schemas. Cognition shapes incoming information as much as information shapes cognition - managers literally see what they're mentally prepared to see. This has radical implications - social constructionists argue that outside reality with all its rich details actually exists inside our heads as mental representations that guide action. Strategic groups, market boundaries, and competitive positions are not objective facts but socially constructed interpretations.
While its central premise - that strategy formation is fundamentally a cognitive process - is valid, strategic management has yet to fully benefit from cognitive psychology's insights. The field needs to understand not just cognitive distortions but also how expert managers make remarkable leaps of cognition through experiential wisdom, creative insight, and intuitive synthesis. Research shows that experienced strategists develop sophisticated mental templates that allow rapid pattern recognition and effective responses to complex situations. They combine analytical thinking with intuitive judgment, using both deliberate reasoning and unconscious processing.
The cognitive school suggests several practical implications: the need to surface and examine managers' mental models, the importance of cognitive diversity in strategy teams, and the value of tools and frameworks that can complement and correct for individual cognitive limitations. Understanding both the strengths and weaknesses of human cognition is essential for improving strategic decision making.
Capítulo 9
The Learning School: Emergent Strategy
The learning school offers an answer to the complexity that overwhelms traditional strategy approaches: strategists learn over time. Strategies emerge as people, individually or collectively, learn about situations and their organization's capabilities, eventually converging on patterns that work.
When strategies fail, traditional thinking blames poor implementation, but learning theorists see this as a false separation between thinking and acting. Research shows significant strategic redirections rarely originate from formal planning or senior management offices. Instead, strategies often emerge from numerous small actions and decisions made throughout the organization, sometimes accidentally, that collectively produce major shifts.
The Honda case presents a stunning contrast between positioning and learning schools. While the Boston Consulting Group portrayed Honda's American motorcycle market success as a deliberate strategy based on experience curves and careful market segmentation, Richard Pascale's interviews with the actual Honda managers revealed a much messier reality. The Japanese executives admitted they "had no strategy" beyond trying to sell something in America. Their eventual success came accidentally when their personal use of small 50cc Supercubs attracted attention, leading to unexpected market demand.
The learning school brings reality to strategy formation study by describing what organizations actually do under complex conditions rather than what they should theoretically do. As demonstrated in Pascale's Honda story, grabbing initiative-even serendipitously or messily-is ultimately voluntaristic, while slotting an organization into supposedly optimal strategies dictated by formal industry analysis is deterministic.
Capítulo 10
The Power School: Strategy as Negotiation
The power school characterizes strategy formation as an overt process of influence where power and politics are used to negotiate strategies favoring particular interests. Unlike earlier schools that ignored political dimensions, this approach examines how strategies emerge from bargaining, compromise, and conflict. This perspective acknowledges that organizational decisions are rarely purely rational but are shaped by complex power dynamics and competing stakeholder interests.
The school distinguishes between micro power (internal organizational politics) and macro power (the organization's use of power in its external environment). Micro power examines strategy making as a political process within organizations, where different departments, divisions, and individuals compete for resources, influence, and strategic direction. Its proponents argue that any form of ambiguity-environmental uncertainty, competing goals, varied perceptions, or resource scarcity-inevitably generates politics. For example, during budget allocation processes, R&D departments might lobby for increased research funding while marketing pushes for larger advertising budgets, each using various political tactics to advance their interests.
Macro power reflects the interdependence between organizations and their environments. Organizations must manage demands from suppliers, buyers, unions, competitors, regulators, and pressure groups while selectively using these actors for organizational benefit. This might involve forming strategic alliances, engaging in collective bargaining, lobbying government bodies, or participating in industry associations. Unlike the environmental school's focus on adaptation, the macro power perspective emphasizes acting upon or negotiating with the external environment rather than merely reacting to it. Companies might, for instance, work to shape industry standards, influence regulatory frameworks, or create barriers to entry for potential competitors.
While politics can be divisive and costly, burning energy that could serve customers, it also serves important functions in organizational life. Politics can act in a Darwinian way to ensure the strongest members reach leadership positions, provide alternate channels when formal authority suppresses strong followers, ensure all sides of an issue are fully debated, and stimulate necessary change blocked by legitimate systems of influence. For example, middle managers might use political processes to champion innovative ideas that challenge established practices, or employee groups might leverage informal networks to advocate for organizational changes that formal channels have rejected.
The power school also recognizes that strategy formation often involves coalition building and negotiation. Successful strategists must be skilled at building support for their initiatives, managing conflicts, and finding compromises that satisfy multiple stakeholders. This might involve creating win-win solutions, trading support across different issues, or developing staged implementation plans that address various constituencies' concerns. Understanding power dynamics becomes crucial for strategy implementation, as even the most brilliant strategy will fail without sufficient political backing and stakeholder support.
Capítulo 11
The Configuration School: Integrating the Perspectives
The configuration school offers a comprehensive reconciliation between all previous schools of strategic thought, suggesting that each approach has its valid time and place in an organization's lifecycle. It views organizations as adopting distinct configurations or stable states that periodically undergo dramatic transformation to new states. While strategy-making inherently involves change, the resulting strategies themselves create stability and coherence in organizational behavior.
Organizations naturally cluster their characteristics into recognizable "states" or "models" that sequence over time as "stages" or "life cycles." For example, startups typically begin with entrepreneurial leaders implementing visionary strategies and informal structures, later evolving into more formalized structures with professional managers using systematic planning processes. Mid-size companies often adopt matrix structures with balanced decision-making approaches, while mature corporations might emphasize efficiency and control through detailed strategic planning systems.
Danny Miller's influential "quantum view of change" suggests organizations resolve the fundamental tension between change and continuity by maintaining strategic stability for extended periods, punctuated by revolutionary transformations when configurations fall out of sync with their environment. These transformations often involve simultaneous changes in strategy, structure, processes, and leadership style. For instance, when IBM transformed from a hardware company to a service-oriented organization, it required wholesale changes across multiple dimensions simultaneously.
In "The Icarus Paradox," Miller warns that the very qualities making an organization excellent can breed subsequent failure, describing specific "trajectories" where success leads to decline. For example, focused companies can become overly narrow ("specialists' syndrome"), while innovative companies might chase novelty at the expense of efficiency ("venturers' vigilance"). Companies like Polaroid and Digital Equipment Corporation exemplify how core competencies can become core rigidities.
The configuration school uniquely integrates the premises of other schools by contextualizing when each approach is most appropriate. During periods of stability, planning and analytical approaches might dominate. In contrast, entrepreneurial or learning approaches might be more suitable during transformational periods. Companies like Intel demonstrate this adaptability, switching between different strategic approaches as circumstances change.
The school emphasizes that selecting the right degree of configuration is a complex balancing act. Managers must navigate between several extremes: avoiding the strategic drift and lack of focus that comes with too little configuration, while preventing the rigidity and inflexibility associated with too much configuration. Organizations like 3M have successfully maintained this balance, combining stable core businesses with continuous innovation.
This perspective particularly resonates in today's dynamic business environment, where organizations must maintain enough stability to operate efficiently while remaining flexible enough to adapt to rapid change. Companies like Amazon exemplify this approach, maintaining stable core operations while continuously transforming into new business areas.
Capítulo 12
Beyond the Schools: Seeing the Whole Beast
No single perspective can fully capture the entirety of strategic management. Just as blind men cannot see the whole elephant by examining individual parts, the complete picture of strategy formation exists not on paper but in the reader's mind.
Every strategy process must combine aspects of all schools-mental and social aspects, environmental demands, leadership energy, and organizational forces. Strategy cannot be purely deliberate or purely emergent. Yet practice does tilt-sometimes more cognitive than interactive, more rational than adaptive, more demanding than entrepreneurial.
The authors celebrate strategic management's newfound "messiness" and eclecticism, rejecting calls for a dominant paradigm. They argue that good practice requires understanding the connections between different strategic approaches, not just focusing on individual schools.
Strategy formation is inherently complex, involving designing, visioning, learning, transforming, analyzing, programming, and negotiating-all in response to demanding environments. Attempting to exclude any of these elements leads to failure. The authors suggest we need to move beyond the narrowness of each school and understand how the "beast of strategy formation" combines all these approaches in real organizational life.
As the safari concludes, the authors call for leaving libraries and classrooms to "plunge into the tangled wilds" of actual strategy formation. Though we may never fully see the entire "beast" of strategy formation, we can certainly see it better by looking beyond individual schools to understand the whole.
