Strategy Safari , the international bestseller on business strategy by leading management thinker Henry Mintzberg and his colleagues Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel, is widely considered a classic work in the field. 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. "Read the book. Let Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, and Joseph Lampel guide you on an enlightening and entertaining excursion through the field of strategy making." -- Lawrence Bennigson, Senior Fellow of the Executive Development Center of the Harvard Business School " Strategy Safari makes a convincing case for juggling several approaches at once. This book furnishes the complete tool set for every manager involved in strategy formation." -- Report on Business Henry Mintzberg is the author of several seminal books, including The Nature of Managerial Work , The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning , and Managers Not MBAs . He is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University. Joseph Lampel is Professor of Strategy at Cass Business School, at City University London. He is the co-editor of the fourth edition of The Strategy Process and of T he Business of Culture: Strategic Perspectives in Media and Entertainment. Bruce Ahlstrand is a Professor at Trent University in Ontario. Chapter One: "AND OVER HERE, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: THE STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT BEAST" THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT by John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887) It was six men of Indostan To learning much inclined, Who went to see the Elephant (Though all of them were blind) That each by observation Might satisfy his mind. The First approached the Elephant, And happening to fall Against his broad and sturdy side, At once began to brawl: "God bless me but the Elephant Is very like a wall." The Second, feeling of the tusk, Cried, "Ho! What have we here So very round and smooth and sharp? To me 'tis mighty clear This wonder of an Elephant Is very like a spear!" The Third approached the animal, And happening to take The squirming trunk within his hands, Thus boldly up and spake: "I see," quoth he, "The Elephant Is very like a snake!" The Fourth reached out an eager hand, And felt around the knee, "What most this wondrous beast is like Is mighty plain," quoth he; "'Tis clear enough the Elephant Is very like a tree!" The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear, Said: "E'en the blindest man Can tell what this resembles most; Deny the fact who can, This marvel of an Elephant Is very like a fan!" The Sixth no sooner had begun About the beast to grope, Than, seizing on the swinging tail That fell within his scope, "I see," quoth he, "the Elephant is very like a rope!" And so these men of Indostan Disputed loud and long, Each of his own opinion Exceeding stiff and strong, Though each was partly in the right, And all were in the wrong! Moral So oft in theologic wars, The disputants, I ween, Rail on in utter ignorance Of what each other mean, And prate about an Elephant Not one of them has seen! We are the blind people and strategy formation is our elephant. Since no one has had the vision to see the entire beast, everyone has grabbed hold of some part or other and "railed on in utter ignorance" about the rest. We certainly do not get an elephant by adding up its parts. An elephant is more than that. Yet to comprehend the whole we also need to understand the parts. The next ten chapters describe ten parts of our strategy-formation beast. Each forms one "school of thought." These ten chapters are framed by this first chapter, which introduces the schools as well as some ideas about strategy itself, and a last chapter which returns to the whole beast. Why Ten? In a colorful article entitled "The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," psychologist George Miller (1956) asked why we tend to favor a quantity of about seven for categorizing things -- for example seven wonders of the world, seven deadly sins, and seven days of the week. This reflects our cognitive makeup, he concluded: seven is about the num