Strategic Change
Strat. Change 7, 121±124 (1998)
D. E. Hussey
Visiting Professor,
Nottingham Trent University
Judging by the number of books recently
published, the market for MBA-level textbooks
in strategy must be expanding at an enormous
rate. In this article I should like to discuss
three of them. My comments may also re¯ect
my concern that much of what students are
taught on many MBA courses does not equip
them to apply the theoretical concepts in real
situations.
The learning process covers more than a
reading of the core course text, so it would be
unfair to hold the authors of what are intended
to be core books accountable for every
concern I have over the skills possessed by
MBA graduates. Similarly, I should not wish to
generalize, and argue that every concern I have
noted applies to every student, and every
university.
No doubt my own career has given me
certain biases: more than 30 years' experience
in strategic management, about 12 of which
were in business organizations, and the
remainder as a consultant. I have had connec-
tions with the academic world over much of
this time, and have been an external examiner
and now a visiting professor at a business
school. My strongest bias is that I believe that it
is dangerous for business to employ an MBA
graduate, or any other manager, who can
discourse on all the concepts and theories of
strategic management, but is unable to apply
them in practical situations. It is equally
dangerous to have someone who knows a
technique of analysis backwards, but has no
conceptual underpinning that allows the ®nd-
ings to be properly understood. So my bias is
# 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Strategy
textbooks: a book
review article
that any MBA textbook should have two strong
pillars, theory and application, and should
build a bridge to help take the reader from one
to the other.
Probably the most used textbook in the UK is
Johnson, and Scholes', Exploring Corporate
Strategy (full details of all books mentioned are
given at the end of the article). The publisher
states that sales of this book have exceeded
300,000 since the ®rst edition appeared in
1984, and this is a superb achievement for any
book. However, this is not a reason why I
should treat the book with particular rever-
ence. The fourth edition has a great strength in
its 21 case studies, which take up about half of
the printed pages. (An edition is available
without the case studies, for management
readers who have no use for them.) It is a
reader-friendly book, in terms of design, but
has occasional carelessness. For example,
Illustration 7.1 on page 281 states that Rolls
Royce sold its automotive division to Vickers in
1971. It did not. It was ¯oated as a separate
quoted company in 1973, and merged with
Vickers in 1980. The illustrations are a useful
part of this book, but they should be accurate.
I would also challenge the worked example
of the value chain, Example 8.1, page 326,
which I do not believe is about the value chain
at all.
At the conceptual level the book is, for the
most part, adequate. I would quarrel with the
chapter on strategic management in practice
on two counts, ®rstly that its review of the
different approaches to strategic management
ignores all the more recent work by Igor Ansoff
Strategic Change, March±April 1998
122
and his colleagues on ®tting how an organ-
ization manages strategically to the degree of
turbulence in its environment. Had this
research-based work not been ignored,
Figure 2.9 on page 64 might have been less
dogmatic and misleading. This ®gure purports
to ®t different approaches to strategic manage-
ment to different types of business, and uses
some of the words that also appear in the
Ansoff work, but without the rigour that makes
real sense of them.
Generally, this book does well in construct-
ing the conceptual pillar I mentioned earlier,
but fails almost entirely in the application pillar,
and the link between the two. So the book
describes the concepts of portfolio analysis,
industry analysis, core competencies, environ-
mental assessment, the value chain, and all that
you would expect to see in a strategy textbook,
but does not tell you how to implement them.
None of these things is easy to do in real
situations, and there is a real danger that the
omission will do the student a disservice. What
is the point of knowing that, for example, it is
important to assess your core competences,
unless a method is also offered to enable you to
do this.
Another new edition of a book with similar
scope is Thompson's, Strategic Management:
Awareness and Change. This contains 11
teaching case studies, and the balance of text
to cases is 700 to 120 pages. Like Johnson and
Scholes' book, the book is designed for ease of
reading, although the absence of colour in this
book makes it slightly less attractive than its
competitor. It too has a number of illustrations,
which are termed either cases or boxes (they
are enclosed in a box).
The conceptual pillar of this book is good in
parts. There is little attempt to integrate and
interpret the various schools of thought about
strategic management. A nod is given to some
of Igor Ansoff's work on turbulence, but I ®nd
it hard to see why a 1998 book should
reference the 1987 thinking of Ansoff on this
subject and not some of his more detailed later
work.
At the broadest level, the descriptions of
strategic management are reasonable, and the
book covers a lot of ground. Some of this is
# 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
D. E. Hussey
done very super®cially. For example there is a
subheading `Competitor Benchmarking' on
page 295. No description of benchmarking is
provided, and Figure 9.7 which relates to this
section purports to show `how we might
benchmark competitors for comparison with
an organisation and customer preferences'.
Figure 9.7 does no such thing, and is called
competitor gap analysis: it does have a brief list
of headings against which customers may be
compared. The conceptual description of
benchmarking is de®cient and misleading,
and no indication is given of how to do it.
There seemed to be an assumption that once
something was described, it would be easy to
do it. Thus there was an introduction to SWOT
analysis, and a suggestion of how to tease out
the strategic issues from a list of strengths and
weaknesses, but no indication of how to arrive
at such a list in the ®rst place. In fact the book
almost invited the reader to guess rather than
analyse on this and many other subjects.
On both concept and application this book
lags well behind that of Johnson and Scholes,
and as I have said I have my concerns about this
book.
The third book was published in 1996. Pitts,
and Lei's Strategic Management: Building and
Sustaining Competitive Advantage paints on
a smaller canvas than the other two. It has just
over 400 pages, and includes many case
examples but not teaching case studies. The
book's scope is de®ned by its subtitle, and
could be argued to start with the ideas of
Michael Porter, and add to these. It does not
attempt to debate the relationship of the
Minzberg/Quinn schools of thought to those
of Ansoff, for example. Nor does it stray from its
commitment to Porter to explore the core
competency concept. But what it does, it does
well, and within its limited objectives gives
good conceptual underpinning, and goes a
long way to helping the reader to apply the
concept. It is too limited in scope to be the
core text of most MBA programmes, but is
excellent supplementary reading. I liked its
organization, treatment and competence, but
even though it does some things well, it also
omits much of what I see as important in
competitive strategy.
Strategic Change, March±April 1998
Strategy textbooks
Obviously there are not the only books
available as core texts, and it would be unfair
of me to make detailed comments about books
I have only seen in catalogues, or which I have
not looked at especially for this article. Yet I
think it is fair to observe that few move any way
to aiding the application of the concepts. Is
strategic management unique in business
school subjects? I believe, for example, that it
is possible to have a fair crack at understanding
marketing and making better marketing
decisions from a study of a standard work
such as Kotler (1994). There is enough there to
help the students do it. Similarly the books
with which Anthony (1983 and 1984) is
associated on management accounting and
control will not turn anyone into an accoun-
tant, but they will enable the student to use
accounting data effectively, to critique informa-
tion, and to undertake analysis using such data.
Complex techniques such as discounted cash
¯ow are covered in such a way that the student
can both apply and interpret them. I could go
on into other subjects, but I think the point is
made.
In strategic management it seems to be
thought enough for the core book to cover
the concepts, but to do no more. So the reader
is told to establish an organization's strengths
and weaknesses, and sometimes what to do
with them when de®ned, but not how to ®nd
them. A result is super®cial analysis, where
they are either plucked out of the air, or
obtained solely by a poll of managers. We know
it is important to establish core competencies,
so that we can go on and change the industry,
but the critical issue of how to ®nd them is
omitted. The value chain appears in all the
books, usually as a page or two of description
supported by one ®gure from Porter (1985). It
is usually his Figure 2.2, the generic value
chain, which assembles the activities of the
organization into an arrow-headed diagram.
The result is that value chain analysis is often
interpreted as placing the departments of the
organization into such a diagram, and little else.
Portfolio analysis techniques show one or
other of the various forms of matrix, with
circles drawn on them to represent an organi-
zation's activity. End of description, so the
# 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
123
student thinks the positions are plotted by
guesswork, and this is what he or she does in
practice. In neither Johnson and Scholes' book
nor Thompson's book could I ®nd a reference
to the dynamic use of portfolio analysis.
Yes, as I said earlier, the student is expected
to do more reading than just the core book, and
most at least will explore Porter. But good
references to the application of many of the
other concepts are hard to ®nd, and are not
given in the core texts, and in any case there is
more needed for the practical application of
the concepts than is contained in Porter
(1985).
What explains the reluctance of authors of
strategic management textbooks to offer a
more complete guide to the subject? As there
are so many books in this mould I have to
wonder how many of the authors have ever
tried to use the concepts they describe in real
and varied situations. And I suppose the same
question might be asked of some of the
lecturers who use these books on their
courses. And if the answer to that question is
`not many', what hope do we have that the
majority of MBA graduates will be equipped to
make a real contribution to their organizations'
strategic success.
Books reviewed
Exploring Corporate Strategy. G. Johnson and
K. Scholes. Prentice Hall, London, ISBN 0-13-
525635-6, 873 pp, price £22.95 (paperback).
Strategic Management: Building and Sustaining
Competitive Advantage. R. A. Pitts and D. Lei,
West Publishing, St Paul, MN, 1996, ISBN-314-
06113-4, 409 pp (paperback).
Strategic Management: Awareness and Change.
J. L. Thompson, Thomson Business Press,
London, 3rd edition, ISBN 1-86152-100-6,
839 pp, price £20.99 (paperback).
References
Anthony, R. N. and Reece, J. S. (1983). Accounting:
Text and Cases, 7th edition, Irwin, Home-
wood, IL.
Strategic Change, March±April 1998
124
Anthony, R. N., Dearden, J. and Bedford, N. M.
(1984). Management Control Systems, 5th
edition, Irwin, Homewood, IL. (This happens
to be the edition I own: a later one will be
available).
CCC 1086±1718/98/020121±04$17.50
# 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
D. E. Hussey
Kotler, P. (1994). Marketing Management: Analy-
sis, Planning, Implementation and Control,
8th edition, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
(A later edition is probably available.)
Porter, M. E. (1985). Competitive Advantage, Free
Press, NY.
Strategic Change, March±April 1998