Nordberg, Donald

English

Bournemouth University Research Online

International Journal of Management Education 8(3) 119Book ReviewRobert M. Grant (2010). Contemporary Strategy Analysis: Text & Cases (7th ed.). Chichester: John Wiley& Sons. 944 pages, £42.99, ISBN-13: 978-0470747094.Q. Why are there so many books on strategy? A. Because it is a subject we know so little about. There is an element of truth in this old joke. Strategy is both amorphous and important. Unlike most othersubjects in business and management, it has no agreed beginning and certainly no end. It is difficult even todetermine when "business policy" became "strategy", or whether strategy is the superset of organisationalbehaviour, human resources, marketing, operations, information systems, finance, accounting, andleadership, or a subset of each.Selecting an approach – and a textbook – involves a baffling array of choices. We can choose from a hugeassortment of cookbooks, too numerous to mention, offering recipes like 200g of PEST, 350g of SWOT, FiveForces, three (or four) Generic Strategies, and a sprinkling of Value Chain. What students will generate andremember is often just the shopping list, because they leave our kitchens before the warm and enticingsmells start to waft from the strategy oven. As an alternative, we can teach strategy as philosophy, picking from the charming Strategy Safari (Mintzberg,Ahlstrand, & Lampel, 2009), the demanding Images of Strategy (Cummings & Wilson, 2003) or thetranscendental What is Strategy? (Whittington, 2001). Such books help lecturers escape more programmaticmodes of thought, but with a risk. Students, especially those with limited first-hand experience of business,have not yet experienced enough of the physics beneath to scale the metaphysics above. A third choice is to offer second-hand experience in lieu of the first-hand: a case study approach to buildappreciation of theory from the experience of crafting a plan. The few hours we have with students oftenmake this approach a luxury, and at the end we will have shown them only a small number of the instrumentsin our toolkits. A fourth organises teaching around categories of problems each tool helps to address, as TheStrategy Pathfinder (Angwin, Cummings, & Smith, 2007) seeks to do, but these are problems students oftenhave not yet seen. These choices may not, of course, have been top of his mind when the editor of IJME requested a review ofone of the many texts in the field, the new edition of Robert Grant's Contemporary Strategy Analysis. Now inits seventh iteration, the book comes in flavours of text-only, cases-only and text and cases combined tosatisfy a variety of teaching methods. It is the first revision since Grant moved his main base from the UnitedStates to Europe, which has perhaps brought a broader vantage point in various corners what was already agood text, without losing the crisp, no-nonsense approach of his earlier editions. The five sections of thebook remain the same: the concept of strategy, the tools, competitive advantage, industry contexts, andcorporate strategy. This organisation is at once logical and arbitrary, comprehensive yet speckled with holes.Grant begins with a history of strategy, starting with financial budgeting in the 1950s and on to planning,positioning, resources and advantage, and then innovation. The contemporary phase – labelled 2009 in thenew edition and 2006 in the previous – is a collection of ethics, global markets and a "winner-takes-all" notionof how some business sectors have become, in effect, single company industries, when one company becomesa standard. This history underpins in part the logic of the book, but the subject soon imposes its messy self onthe order he has tried to create. An example: Chapter 2 involves a plunge into the icy waters of financialanalysis. When we emerge it is to an exhilarating – and, for students, frightening – encounter with realoptions, which draws lessons on valuation from a different and dark corner of finance. The logic of realoptions, however, arises more comfortably after a discussion of a resource-based approach to strategy, whichwe have not yet seen. We learn soon from Grant about resources and capabilities, of course, too soon if thiswere really an historical account, even before he discusses competitive advantage. Grant recounts MichaelPorter's attempt to explain advantage by placing elements in different parts of the topology of this book. Indoing so, Grant deprives Porter of the chance to present his integrated whole, but his work fits in better withGrant's structure. The final chapter – one that students may never reach – is an example of the increasingly common attemptamong textbook writers to provide a glimpse of "current thinking" – often a miscellany of things that did notfit elsewhere. In Grant's chapter we learn of volatility in the economy, economic crisis (new in this edition!),complexity, adaptability, and how to reorient the approach a business takes to shareholder value. Here liesthe flaw of this part of the venture – indeed the root of the problem in selecting any approach to teachingand writing about strategy. These are huge subjects in themselves, treated here just in outline. As a result,their links to what we have learned from earlier chapters seem less than obvious: the focus in strategicInternational Journal of Management Education 8(3)120thinking on resources and capabilities arose, after all, in response to the need for adaptability in a complexand volatile business environment, one which had defeated more programmatic approaches to settingstrategy through what Mintzberg calls planning, positioning and design. These themes – and the core topic ofmaking decisions for an uncertain future – are integral to the study of strategy, not a bolt-on of things we lackthe time to discuss in detail. Grant's is a better book than many, with something approaching a narrative and less of the feel of anencyclopaedia, but describing this subject is a daunting task: each topic makes more sense when you havelearned something else first. Textbook writers must therefore despair when the editor or a reviewer says thevolume includes "too much portfolio analysis", "too little innovation", or even "Porter in the wrong order",when the material is as messy and disorderly – as complex – as this. Nonetheless, we long for a book thatcaptures the richness of a field that has excited us to teach, think and write about it. Perhaps the route lies in setting a path that describes strategy less as a series of objects or models to bememorised and manipulated, and more as a response of people in organisations to change. Our understandingwould grow from the notion that rapid shifts in fad and fashion, disruptive technologies, market volatility –and indeed the slow and inexorable swings associated with demography, natural resources and the climate –inform how businesses organise resources and select where to invest. It might combine elements of theempirical research we now call "strategy as practice" with a collection of tools that have worked, more orless, in one setting or another, some of the time, for some companies. The loops and twists in Grant's textapproximate this knowledge, as he attempts to link the contemporary to the ancient world of strategy, theexternal focus of competitive advantage to the introspective one of resources.The approach I suggest might not lend itself to the linear flow of a book with Chapters 1 to 18 and theassociated sets of presentation slides. Nor is it a purely case-based approach: even with the good selection inthis volume, someone needs to recount the story of strategy as well. Grant's is an admirable attempt, if onerooted more in conventional than contemporary analysis. ReferencesAngwin, D., Cummings, S., & Smith, C. (2007). The strategy pathfinder: Core concepts and micro-cases. Oxford: Blackwell.Cummings, S., & Wilson, D. (Eds.). (2003). Images of strategy. Oxford: Blackwell.Mintzberg, H., Ahlstrand, B., & Lampel, J. (2009). Strategy safari: Your complete guide through the wilds of strategicmanagement (2nd ed.). Harlow: FT Prentice Hall.Whittington, R. (2001). What is strategy – and does it matter? (2nd ed.). London: Thomson Learning.Donald Nordberg is Senior Lecturer in Strategy at Westminster Business School and Visiting Professor ofJournalism at City University London. He is also editor and publisher of The BoardAgenda(www.boardagenda.com).

Strategy safari: Your complete guide through the wilds of strategic management (2nd ed.).

The strategy pathfinder: Core concepts and micro-cases.

What is strategy – and does it matter? (2nd ed.). London: Thomson Learning.

Book Review: Grant's Contemporary Strategy Analysis

http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/20632/3/Nordberg%20StrategyOven%20IJME%20apr10.pdf

Book Review: Grant's Contemporary Strategy Analysis

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