ix The book's objective is to help you think about strategy - about what to do and how to do it. Its guiding proposition is that strategy is hard... Precisely to help you think seriously about strategy, this book will bombard you with different views and discrepant information. You won't be given any answers, but from what you have here and your own experience, you should finish by thinking differently. What I hope is that you will emerge with your own coherent philosophy of strategy, something that will be a resource and guide in all the unforeseeable, non-standard events and opportunities that may make up your managerial life.

p.1 This book will not promise to make you rich, nor will it soothe you with bland unanimity. Instead it will properly treat strategy as the contested and imperfectable practice it really is.

p.2 There is not much agreement about strategy... Instead of offering you just one kind of view, this book builds on four generic approaches to strategy. [JLJ - formatting added below for readability]

1. The Classical approach, the oldest and still the most influential, relies on the rational planning methods dominant in the textbooks.
2. Next, the Evolutionary approach draws on the fatalistic metaphor of biological evolution, but substitutes the discipline of the market for the law of the jungle.
3. Processualists emphasize the sticky imperfect nature of all human life, pragmatically accommodating strategy to the fallible processes of both organizations and markets.
4. Finally, the Systemic approach is relativistic, regarding the ends and means of strategy as inescapably linked to the cultures and powers of the local social systems in which it takes place.

p.3 For the Classicists, good planning is what it takes to master internal and external environments. Strategy matters in that rational analysis and objective decisions make the difference between long-run success and failure.

p.3 Evolutionists... answer that startegy in the Classical sense of rational future-oriented planning is often irrelevant. The environment is typically too implacable, too unpredictable to anticipate effectively... From the Evolutionary perspective, then, it is the market, not managers, which makes the important choices. Successful strategies only emerge as the process of natural selection delivers its judgment. All managers can do is ensure that they fit as efficiently as possible to the environmental demands of the day.

p.3-4 Processualists... strategy emerges more from a pragmatic process of bodging, learning and compromise than from a rational series of grand leaps forward... It does not matter much if the emergent strategy is not quite optimal. The selection processes of the market are actually rather lax: as no-one else is likely to know what the optimal strategy is, and no-one would be able to stick to it anyway, failure to devise and carry out the perfect strategic plan is hardly going to deliver any fatal competitive disadvantage.

p.4 The Systemic approach... believes that strategy reflects the particular social systems in which strategists participate, defining for them the interests in which they act and the rules by which they can survive.

p.4 each perspective has its own view of strategy and how it matters for managerial practice.

p.9 Theories... are actually short-cuts to action... we all tend to have our own private assumptions about how things work, how to get things done... The danger of these theories is forgetting we have them.

p.23 Strategies, then, are a way in which managers try to simplify and order a world which is too complex and chaotic for them to comprehend. The regular procedures and precise quantifications of strategic planning are comforting rituals, managerial security blankets in a hostile world... strategy is discovered in action (March, 1976).

p.24 The incrementalist approach... may be informed by an underlying logic, or 'strategic intent', that is both sufficiently clear to provide a sense of direction and sufficiently broad to allow flexibility and opportunism along the way... More radically, Mintzberg and Waters (1985) suggest, the underlying strategic logic may be perceived only after the event. Strategies are often 'emergent', their coherence accruing through action and perceived in retrospect.

p.25 As [Intel] Chief Executive Officer Andy Grove observed: 'Don't ask managers "What is your strategy?" Look at what they do!' (Burgelman 1996:423).

p.40 The strategy discipline is finally beginning to emerge from the strait-jacket of orthodoxy.

p.57 Strategies form out of a mixture of analysis and instinct, routine and spontaneity, top and bottom, fortune and error.

p.58 Almost all strategic decisions involve an investment of some sort... The strategic option that promises the greatest net benefits, quantified in financial terms should always be chosen. Rankings make strategic choice easy. In a sense, technique obviates decision... In a competitive environment, survival does require close attention to economically optimal strategies.

p.60 It seems, then, that senior decision-making teams are remarkably tolerant of ambiguity, formulating their strategies according to often vague and even contradictory criteria.

p.61 Decisions are often not 'taken' but 'happen'. Cohen et al. (1972) suggest that moments of decision occur when four independent streams happen to coincide: 'problems', 'solutions', 'participants' and 'choice opportunities'... According to Cohen and his colleagues, organizations are like 'garbage cans' into which these four independent elements are thrown together and shaken until a more or less random conjunction produces a decision. Thus a board meeting is a choice opportunity whose decisions depend on the problems and solutions its particular participants happen to bring.

p.62 A great deal of our behaviour is not 'decided' at all... Nelson and Winter (1982) suggest that as strategic decision-takers gain experience they build up strategic 'routines' by which to guide their responses to the various challenges that regularly crop up in their industry. The more expert they become, the more they can rely on their established routines and the fewer real decisions they need to make.

[JLJ - This agrees with my feeling that much of what we call a 'decision' is in fact 'pre-decided' - we simply 'decide' that we have a case A or case B here, and then act as we have previously determined we would do, in such a condition. We don't as much 'decide' as 'determine' which condition applies here, in the current situation or predicament, and then we execute the pre-decided-upon script for such and such a condition. We execute our standard operating procedures - perhaps later at a weekly meeting we might decide to change the procedures in certain cases.]

p.68 In his fierce critique, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, Henry Mintzberg (1994) identifies three fundamental fallacies in Classical strategic planning. First, there is the Fallacy of Predetermination: the vain hope that planners can produce accurate forecasts... Then there is the Fallacy of Detachment: the claim of professional planners that they bring objectivity and perspective in place of politics and myopia... Finally there is the Fallacy of Formalization: the belief that innovation and difference are generated by analysis and structure.

[JLJ - I would argue that CEOs and Boards of Directors and majority stockholders get exactly the type of strategic planning that they ask for - and it is their fault for not implementing broad change of all types in the face of changing driving forces that threaten to undermine traditional planning efforts.]

p.93 Game theory extends the focus of strategic action to include the anticipated reaction of competitors.

p.94 Critical to multinational strategy, therefore, is the capacity to exchange meaningful threats (Graham 1990).

p.99 The problem for strategy is that organizations are, literally, 'mindless'. They have no unity and collectively they are rather stupid.

[JLJ - Perhaps, but an organization is composed of individuals who (to a large extent) follow scripts written by a collection of schemers who hope to individually benefit from the collective action. Every business owner has a money-making scheme, which he executes in practice, hiring only those who he feels can move his plan forward. Mindless? Perhaps during certain phases of execution, but scheming minds monitor and adjust all aspects - critical success factors included - of the scheme's execution. A computer is literally 'mindless', yet guided by a well-written program and scheming programmer, produces outcomes which can rival that of the best minds. Arguably, the CEO of an organization is the 'mind', and everything else in it is an extension of a process which he wants in place.]

p.100 Top managers spend more time and energy on implementing strategies than choosing them. Strategies that are well chosen will fail because of poor implementation.

[JLJ - I would argue that strategies are much like spiders spinning a web or bears trolling for fish near a waterfall. The strategy determines the posture or position, but the end result depends on who or what stumbles into the web or waterfall, and their attempts to pursue their own goals. A business must deal with customers who are out for the best deal for themselves, and who will go elsewhere if a better deal is so perceived. Whatever the strategy chosen, it must involve at core a simple getting to 'yes' of the customer, all things considered, and all excuses offered foreseen in advance.]

p.118 This book has dealt with four very different perspectives on strategy - Classical, Evolutionary, Processual and Systemic... for every manager the strategy-making process starts with a fundamental strategic choice: which theoretical picture of human activity and environment fits most closely with his or her own view of the world.

p.123 Vladimir Gusinsky... 'I cannot say I am an absolutely honest man'.

[JLJ - Honesty about one's dishonesty makes you, what?]