Strategy Bites Back:

It's a Lot More, and Less, than you Ever Imagined...

  Mintzberg, H., Ahlstrand, B., & Lampel, J. (2005). Strategy bites back: It’s a lot more, and less, than you ever imagined… Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.  

Business strategy icon Henry Mintzberg has been an outspoken cheerleader on the both sides of strategy research sidelines, and his 2005 book Strategy Bites Back (co-authored with Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel) is true to his candid character.  The authors confess early in this book that it is one book on strategy that is intended to be taken lightly: “Strategy can be awfully boring,” the opening sentence reads.  In subsequent chapters, then, an assortment of research and popular press “bytes” (informative research pieces) and “bites” (sources critical of strategy) are used to illustrate what strategy is and isn’t.

The following points highlight the most salient opinions in the book:

• Strategies are often conceived and conveyed in terms of metaphors or images.  Strategic thinking as is often portrayed as “seeing,” and Mintzberg contends strategic thinkers are appropriately described as “visionaries.”  He argues that strategy thinkers 1) see ahead while seeing behind; 2) see above while seeing below (inductive thinking); and 3) see beside while seeing beyond.    “What is the value of this seeing if nothing gets done?”, Mintzberg cautions.  For a thinker to deserve the label strategic, he argues, he or she must also see it through.


• Traditional strategic planning that focuses too much on hard quantitative analysis suffers from the following weaknesses of hard data:

       1. Hard information is often limited in scope, lacking richness
       2. Much hard information is too aggregated to be of effective use in strategy making.
       3. Much hard information arrives too late to be of use in strategy making.
       4. Finally, a surprising amount of hard information is unreliable.
      Ideally, the authors contend, strategy making draws on both kinds of information, hard and soft.

• The higher up a manager is in the organization, the more the information he or she receives is filtered by several levels of subordinated, as assistants, and secretaries.  Wason (1972) a cognitive psychologist, found that as much as 90 percent of all the information we are searching for aims at supporting views, beliefs, or hypotheses that we have long cherished.  Skeptics, on the other hand, have remembered both supportive and disconfirming evidence equally well – their accuracy was 90 percent in both cases.


• Strategic thinkers are driven by three things: Image, Intention and Flexibility.  Mintzberg argues that strategic thinkers see today’s systems and understand the interdependence among their parts. In addition, they see an image of tomorrow’s desired new system and the likely path that today’s system must follow in order to evolve into tomorrow’s.

If you are a strategy novice, this book will likely be at least entertaining if not informative to you for its jocular approach to a potentially intimidating subject.  Its chapters are intentionally brief, and the authors’ commentary between articles provides a narrative, conversational style that facilitates quick reading.  Readers seeking more in-depth explanations of strategy concepts would be well-informed to search elsewhere, but for a light-hearted alternative to other strategy books, this selection may be a good choice. 

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