Strategic Change
Strat. Change, 8, 243±247 (1999)
David Hussey
Several books, which are intended mainly
for managers rather than students and
academics, have crossed my desk recently. I
thought it would be interesting to discuss a
few of these, and have rather arbitrarily
made my own classi®cation into basic books,
usually of around 100 pages, and more
substantial books written for managers. The
criterion for inclusion in this list is that the
books aim to help managers use existing
concepts. They do not try to present new
ideas or approaches, although they may draw
heavily on the way the author has made the
concepts work in real situations.
Books of this type have an honourable
history, which does not mean that they are all
of equal merit. Before strategic management
became an academic as well as a practical
subject, most books on strategy or planning
were written with managers in mind. The book
designed for teaching strategy did not begin to
become commonplace until the 1970s, and
books which explored new theories of
strategic management were few and far be-
tween until the 1980s. In fact in the 1960s,
when the subject might be said to have begun,
there were very few books. Of course someone
may prove me wrong, but I would argue that
all the books written in this decade were
concerned about the practical aspect of
strategic planning. I might allow one exception
in Christensen, Andrews and Bowers, 1965,
Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Basic and practical
books on strategic
management:
book review
article
most of which was taken up with teaching
case studies, but generally if the books were
not reporting research into the best way to
proceed (for example Scott, 1965 and Warren,
1966), they were trying to give guidance to
managers on how to plan (Argenti, 1968,
Steiner, 1969, and Hussey, 1971, although the
last book is included because much of it was
written in 1969, and because it will appear in
its ®fth edition next year), or reporting what
companies said as they explained their plan-
ning processes (Steiner, 1963). Even Ansoff,
(1965), which many see as the book which laid
the foundations for the study of strategy as a
subject was aimed at top management.
Of course there were more books than I have
listed, particularly towards the end of the
1960s, and thereafter the stream became a
¯ood, until by today the ¯ood has become an
ocean.
This tradition of writing books which are
both comprehensive and intelligible, and
which set out to help managers apply strategic
management has continued until the present
day, although in the 1980s and 1990s there has
also been a vast increase in academic text
books (some of which do little more than
present theories), and in books which try to
promote the author's new concept and demol-
ish all others. As the subject has expanded,
there has also been an increase in books which
focus on one aspect of strategy, such as a
Strategic Change, June±July 1999
244
technique of analysis, implementation, or
acquisition.
Basic books
Layton, S., Hurd, A. and Lipsey, W., How to
Plan Your Competitive Strategy, Kogan Page,
London, 1995, paperback, 93pp, ISBN 0-7494-
1907-5, price £6.99. The Better Management
Skills series, in which this book is published,
now covers many aspects of management. As
an author of another of the books in this series,
I know how frustrating it is to an author to
have to compress a complex subject into a
format which does not allow space to explore
the situations that do not quite ®t the
approaches recommended. The in-built
assumption in this book is that strategy
should be determined on a team basis, and
this of course is far from a universal truth. My
main criticism of the book is that it trivializes
most things into checklists and questionnaires.
The danger is that it invites managers to base
plans on their perceptions, which are in my
experience rarely the same as the reality.
Listing strengths and weaknesses is of course
important, but the real issue is not whether
items can be listed, but whether these are the
right items. The three information gathering
steps described are SWOT, PEST and compe-
titor intelligence, but the number of pages
devoted to these is so small that the reader is
forced to rely on the checklists and guesswork.
Having got the information, the assumption is
that the team should then head off for a group
meeting to determine the strategy. The main
good point in the steps recommended is that
the authors stress implementation and control,
once a strategy has been determined. I suppose
it would be possible for a reasonable strategy
to be developed using the steps recom-
mended, if you have managers who can add
all the missing initiatives. But if the managers
already had enough knowledge to make the
necessary adaptations to the text, would they
be the people reading the book anyway?
Swords, D. and Turner, I., Strategy from the
Inside Out, Thomson, London, 1997,
Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
David Hussey
paperback, 134pp, ISBN 1-86152-192-8, price
£10.99. This book has more depth to it than
Layton et al. It is in a series Self development
for Managers, and manages to pack in an
introduction to many more approaches to
analysis and, in my opinion, its checklists and
questionnaires are better designed to stimul-
ate thinking. The book approaches the task in
an interesting way. Each chapter describes a
concept, and at the end of the chapter are
exercises to help the reader apply the con-
cepts to a speci®c organization. The method
chapters are followed by some exercises to
pull the thinking together, which lead into
chapters on creating the right strategy and
enacting strategy.
There is a lot packed into this little book.
Perhaps the essential difference between this
and the previous book can be summarized in
the work sheets on external factors. Layton
et al. have a worksheet which asks readers to
list the factors that affect them, classify them as
political, economic, social or technological,
indicate the impact as positive or negative, and
add comments: and that is almost all the
guidance given. Swords and Turner take the
reader through aspects of uncertainty based on
Ansoff's recent work, and their PEST work-
sheet is much more speci®c about why and
where the event is likely to affect the company.
There is then more guidance on what all this
might mean, followed by an exercise to apply
the thinking in a real situation. Given the
limitations of its size, I think that the Swords
and Turner book does stimulate learning and
thinking through a large number of concepts
and methods, and could be helpful to an
organization struggling with its strategy.
Wooten, S. and Horne, T., Strategic Planning:
the Nine Step Programme, Kogan Page,
London, 1997, paperback, 128pp, ISBN
0-7494-2060-X, price £12.99. This book is
mainly checklists and questionnaires, with
little conceptual underpinning. The nine
steps are knowing what is going on out
there, knowing your organization, bringing it
all together, forecasting where you are going,
deciding where you are going, ®nding the
gaps, considering your options, checking it for
Strategic Change, June±July 1999
Book review article
sense, and deciding how to do it. This is a
reasonable way of putting the typical planning
model into everyday language. There are some
useful things among the prompt sheets and
questionnaires, although some are simplistic.
For example the prompt sheet on machines in
the knowing your organization section asks
questions about machines but not methods,
processes or manufacturing policy. It would
be possible to answer every one of the
questions posed, and miss the most important
points about manufacturing capability. In fact
only 10 of the questions on the list are about
plant: the remaining eight are about the
telephone and fax system.
The other danger of prompt sheets is beyond
control of the author, in that it is possible for
managers to guess, or put down what they
think. There is no suggestion in the book that
the prompt sheets should be used as a basis for
objective analysis, or even having to say `how
do you know this' as part of the answer to each
question. In comparison with Swords and
Turner, this book is far behind. Readers might
have a better idea of some useful steps in the
planning process, will ®nd some questions to
answer that they may not have thought of, but
will not know why some of the questions are
important, or how to think things through for
themselves.
Practical books
McNamee, P., Strategic Marketing Planning: a
Blue Print for Success, Wiley, Chichester,
1998, hardback, 363pp, ISBN 0-471-97932-5,
price £19.99. This, the ®rst of the three
comprehensive books I want to mention, is
one that I cannot with integrity review in
depth, because I am the general editor of the
Wiley Practical Series in which it appears. The
practical series is written for managers, but is
`academically respectable', and so will also be
used in executive development programmes.
Other books in the series include tightly
focused works on the virtual organization
and business unit strategy, competitor analysis,
and in the pipeline are books on shareholder
value, multinational strategic alliances and
Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
245
public sector planning. I can quote from a
review of McNamee by Charles Kingsmill,
which appeared in Strategy, November, 1998
Any manager following the clear method-
ologies of this book will certainly have
powerful analysis on his or her side. And
that would be an excellent starting point to
setting out to in¯uence everyone else in
this business.
This book, written in the tradition of the best
practical books described earlier, will be
reviewed separately by a reviewer who has
no connection with either the author or the
book. The title, by the way, re¯ects the author's
belief that successful strategy interprets the
message from the market. The book is not
restricted to market planning, and gives a
comprehensive view of the development of
successful strategies.
Hardy, L., Successful Business Strategy: How
to Win in the Market-place, 2nd edition,
Windrush Books, Kingsbridge, Devon, 1997,
354pp, hardback, ISBN 0-9525626-1-8, price
£18.99. Len Hardy was formerly with Lever
Brothers, rising to chairman, a position he
held for 10 years. The books falls in the `it
worked for me so it must be right for you'
category. Although there is some good advice,
the book is woefully de®cient. The blurb on
the cover is somewhat misleading, in that it
implies that the book is suitable for all
businesses and students, and that it includes
40 case studies. In fact it is fair to say that the
bias of the whole book is to fast moving
consumer goods, and that there are no normal
case studies. There are 40 short examples,
drawn from consumer products, mainly
detergents and household cleaning products.
There is not much of value for any organiz-
ations outside of consumer products, and I
would argue no value for many of them.
In one sense Len Hardy has made a notable
achievement, to write a book about strategy
without a single diagram, checklist or table,
and with almost no references. Such refer-
ences as there are are very old (1955, 1967,
1970, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1983). While not
Strategic Change, June±July 1999
246
questioning the fact that age does not necess-
arily make a reference invalid, the clock does
appear to have stopped around 20±25 years
ago. Consequently there is nothing here on the
ideas of Porter, Hamel and Prahalad, Yip, or
Ohmae, to name but a few.
So let's get back to what the book is really
about. The book explores marketing strategies,
and brand management, within a country
subsidiary of a multinational, whose products
are a focused area of fast moving consumer
goods. In such a situation global competition is
handled elsewhere, and businesses operate
solely within the geographical boundaries set
by the head of®ce. Add to this the particular
competitive structure of the consumer deter-
gents industry, and you begin to understand the
content of the book. If you are a marketing
manager in such a company, you may ®nd the
chosen scope of the content useful. If you are
not, but are in fast moving consumer products,
you will get something out of it, but will notice
many de®ciencies. If you are in neither
situation, there is not much here for you.
Examples of the focus are in the chapters on
product costs and capacity which, together, are
as close as Hardy comes to considering
manufacturing strategy, and in the section on
company culture. Manufacturing is considered
very much from the traditional viewpoint of a
marketing manager, that is not as a strategic
driver. There are sections on traditional cost
components, such as raw materials, but
nothing at all on manufacturing methods,
such as JIT, outsourcing, the focused factory,
lean production, or world class performance.
Similarly corporate culture is declared as
important: `There is little doubt that the
development of a sound company culture can
be a major strength for the business con-
cerned.' (page 199.) Of the three pages
devoted to it, one describes the evolution of
Unilever, one is a comparison of the history of
Lever and Proctor and Gamble, and one says
nothing of value. The question of how you
develop a sound culture is ignored.
On page 16 he asserts that business schools
and universities have concentrated on the
more fundamental aspects of strategy formu-
lation, and that it is appropriate that they
Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
David Hussey
should consider basic theories and concepts.
He accepts that some management consult-
ancies have brought new strategy concepts
forward to develop their own businesses, and
that the `best of these have had a strong
in¯uence on the strategic thinking of many
businessmen'. But
The younger manager, making his way up
the business ladder, is likely to recognise
that the literature available to help him form
a practical approach to strategy formulation
is indeed very limited. A prime aim of this
book is to provide a series of guidelines to
construct a practical approach.
If the new manager is joining Lever Brothers,
the book may be a good buy. For anyone else,
my advice is to save your money and invest it in
one of the numerous good books that are
available, some of which take a late 1990s view
of strategy, rather than the 1970s view of this
book.
Aaker, D. A., Developing Business Strategies,
5th edition, John Wiley & Sons, New York,
1998, 330 pp, hardback, ISBN 0-471-18364-4,
price £25.95. This is a considerably better book
than the Successful Business Strategy:
perhaps Len Hardy should note that it is in its
5th edition, and has clearly been around for
many years. The target audience for Aaker's
book is managers, either for practical use
within their organizations, or for use on
executive development courses. Where Hardy
saw strategy as a matter mainly of markets and
brands, Aaker takes a broader view, covering
the choice of product market, the level of
investment, the functional strategies needed to
compete, and `the strategic assets or compe-
tencies that underlie the strategy and provide
sustainable competitive advantage.' For all but
the most tightly focused organizations, he adds
the allocation of resources between business
units, and the development of synergistic
effects across the businesses. This view is
both practical and realistic.
The book brie¯y traces the evolution of
strategic approaches through the formal
system of the 1960s and 1970s, to the greater
Strategic Change, June±July 1999
Book review article
¯exibility required by increasing environ-
mental turbulence in the 1980s and 1990s.
The author's term for the modern requirement
is strategic market management, which he
sees as an approach which embraces all the
previous concepts and adds something more.
This is refreshing, as so many authors seem to
feel that their own views can only succeed if
they demolish everything that has gone before.
The book therefore deals adequately with
traditional aspects of strategic planning such as
the internal and external appraisal, including
market and competitor analysis. It adds
environmental uncertainty and then moves
on to ways of obtaining sustainable competi-
tive advantage. There are ®ve chapters on
different types of strategy, followed by another
on global strategy. The ®nal two chapters cover
implementation and the planning system, the
latter being supported by examples of planning
checklists and questionnaires. There are many
case examples, from various industries.
That's the outline. How well has he com-
pleted it? The ®rst point in his favour is that the
book is well written in an undogmatic way. In
general terms the coverage of each chapter is
comprehensive and helpful. There are weak-
nesses. Most techniques are described only at
the conceptual level, and I would challenge
anyone to apply the value chain or portfolio
analysis solely on the strength of what is
written here. He tends to ignore the `soft'
issues: for example, you will not ®nd a great
deal about people or culture in the imple-
mentation chapter, although he does use a four
sided variant of the Leavitt diamond (people,
structure, systems, culture) and at least draws
attention to the inter relationship of these
matters with each other and with strategy.
It is always easy to say what is omitted from a
book, but much harder to say whether some-
thing else should have been left out to keep the
overall length to its target. My view is that the
strength of the book is its practical concen-
tration on different strategic situations, and
that at least he ¯ags up that other things are
important. This is one that I should recom-
mend, whatever business you might work in.
The preface claims that the book would also be
useful for not for pro®t organizations, such as
CCC 1086±1718/99/040243±05$17.50
Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
247
colleges, police forces, and churches. I would
not give such a strong endorsement of the book
for these managers, although there would be
something of value for them.
There are no prizes for forecasting which
three of the above books will remain on my
bookshelf, and which will be put in the next
charity collection sack delivered to my house.
What this selection of books does show is that
the practical and basic strategy segment of the
market is still being served and that, as in the
past, there is a wide variation in the quality
of what is offered. The three books I have
endorsed all have one thing in common: they
are written to cover the problems and issues of
today. I wish I could say the same for some of
the other books on the market.
Biographical note
David Hussey has had a long career in the
strategy area in industry and as a consultant.
He has written or edited 25 books on strategy
and other aspects of management, and is
editor of this journal. One of the founders of
the Strategic Planning Society, and a director
of Japan Strategic Management Society, he is
also a visiting professor in strategic manage-
ment at Nottingham Trent University.
References
Ansoff, H. I. (1965). Corporate Strategy, McGraw
Hill, New York.
Argenti, J. (1968). Corporate Planning: a Practical
Guide, Allen & Unwin, London.
Christensen, C. R., Andrews, K. R. and Bower,
J. L. (1965). Business Policy: Text and Cases,
Irwin, Homewood, Illinois.
Scott, B. W. (1965). Long Range Planning in
American Industry, American Management
Association, New York.
Steiner, G. A. (ed.) (1963). Managerial Long
Range Planning, McGraw Hill, New York.
Steiner, G. A. (1969). Top Management Planning,
Macmillan, New York.
Warren, E. K. (1966). Long Range Planning: the
Executive Viewpoint, Prentice Hall, Englewood
Cliffs, NJ.
Strategic Change, June±July 1999