The result is a tour de force: a brilliant, penetrating primer on business strategy that is, at the same time, immensely readable and fun. The authors provide a thorough critique of the contributions and limitations of each school -- from the design, planning, positioning, entrepreneurial, and cognitive schools to the learning, power, cultural, environmental, and configurational schools -- culminating in how they might combine to reveal that elephant.

Unique, insightful, and essential, Strategy Safari is the indispensable guide for the creative manager.

Everyone knows where a straight line goes... but a squiggly line can go anywhere.

Computers generate straight lines. Life generates squiggly ones. That's why your predictable business strategies never turn out the way you expect. Too many strategy books see the world as if it were a straight line. Serious. Predictable. And deadly dull. This book knows something they don't. It knows you need to slay dragons and charm snakes in a business world that's awfully squiggly, but, also, endlessly fun and fascinating. So, this book takes you off the beaten path. Way off.

Here, strategy finally does bite back, at all the boring books and professors you had to stomach to get here. It'll knock you off your chair and help open your mind...to get past the ""straight line"" thinking that can't be right.

Dare to be creative, contrarian....heck, be bold and make your own personal strategy revolution:

<ul> <li>Strategy as a ""little black dress"" <li>Bringing simplicity and elegance back into strategy formation <li>A deep dive inside the strategist's head <li>What you can know, what you can't know, and how to tell the difference <li>Seduction, not just deduction <li>Using strategy to treat employees like lovers, not servants <li>Strategy with the gloves off¿and the halo on <li>Power, intrigue, punch, and serious jeopardy <li>and much more... <li> ...and much less

Bring passion, imagination, creativity, and fun back to strategy¿and surprise the folks at home!

OK, strategy is crucial. We know that. Everyone knows that. But why must it be so deadly serious? So plodding, uncreative, boring? Dull strategy books promote dull strategists who create dull strategies that fail. Now there's an antidote: Strategy Bites Back.

It's full of insight and daring, from Gary Hamel to Napoleon Bonaparte, Michael Porter to Hans Christian Andersen, all tied together by the triumvirate that is Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, and Joe Lampel. Essays, poems, case studies, cartoons...whatever it takes to free your mind and unleash the crucial emotional side of strategy formation.

This is the whole squiggly shebang: strategy and gamesmanship, black dresses, and seduction...strategy lessons from your mother, from beehives, chess grandmasters, even the National Zoo.

<p> Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel take on every sacred cow and entrenched belief that keeps you from recognizing your most powerful options¿and acting on them. Fun? Heck, yeah. But it'll help you define inspired strategies that offer huge upsides...and what could be more fun than that?"

No other book synthesizes the entire history and evolution of strategic management in so lively and entertaining a fashion. Since the initial publication of Strategy Safari, managers, consultants, and academics all over the world have found this book an indispensable and delightful tool -- it has been translated into more than ten languages, including Chinese, Russian, and French, and has been used in top MBA programs worldwide.

Strategy Safari makes sense of a field that often seems to make no sense. Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel pair their sweeping vision of strategy making with an authoritative catalog in which they identify ten schools of strategy that have emerged over the past four decades.

Why struggle through the vast, confusing terrain of strategy formation? With clarity and depth, Strategy Safari maps the strategic landscape and facilitates intelligent, informed strategy formation.