Book Review: Strategy Bites Back

Submitted By harjotaujla
Words: 416
Pages: 2

BOOK REVEIW
The book ‘Strategy Bites Back’ has lot of information about strategy. It has different definitions of strategy and other topics like five P’s for strategy, seven deadly sins of planning, how to plan strategy, launching strategy etc, and lot of other stuff. But below are some of the unique ideas about strategy that I discovered in this book.
Beware of strategy:
Strategy absence needs not to be associated with organizational failure. Deliberate building-in of strategy absence may promote flexibility in an organization. Organizations with tight controls, high reliance on formalized procedures and a passion for consistency may lose the ability to experiment and innovate.
An absence of a rigid pattern of strategic decision making may ensure that “noise” is retained in organizational systems, without which strategy may become a specialized recipe that decreases flexibility and blocks learning and adaption.
Strategies are to organizations what blinders are to horses: they keep going in a straight line, but impede the use of peripheral vision. By focusing effort and directing the attention of each part within the integrated whole, the organization runs the risk of being unable to change its strategy when it has to.
Sometimes lack of strategy is temporary and even necessary. It may, for example, simply represent a stage in the transition from an outdated strategy to a new, more viable one.

Bees and flies making strategy example If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees and the same number of flies and lay the bottle horizontally, with its base (the closed end) to the window, you will find that the bees will persist, till they die of exhaustion or hunger in their endeavor to discover an opening