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Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics
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Strategic Management
and Organisational
Dynamics
The Challenge of Complexity
to Ways of Thinking about
Organisations
Seventh edition
Ralph D. Stacey and Chris Mowles

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Harlow CM20 2JE
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First published under the Pitman Publishing imprint 1993 (print)
Second edition published 1996 (print)
Third edition published 2000 (print)
Fourth edition published 2003 (print)
Fifth edition published 2007 (print)
Sixth edition published 2011 (print and electronic)
Seventh edition published 2016 (print and electronic)
© Ralph D. Stacey 1993, 1996, 2000, 2003, 2007 (print)
© Ralph D. Stacey 2011, 2016 (print and electronic)
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ISBN: 978-1-292-07874-8 (print)
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for the print edition is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stacey, Ralph D., author.
Strategic management and organisational dynamics : the challenge of complexity to ways of
thinking about organisations / Ralph D. Stacey and Chris Mowles. — Seventh edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-292-07874-8
1. Strategic planning. 2. Organizational behavior. I. Mowles, Chris, author. II. Title.
HD30.28.S663 2016
658.4’012—dc23
2015026419
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
20 19 18 17 16
Print edition typeset in 10/12.5 Sabon LT Pro by 76
Printed in Slovakia by Neografia
NOTE THAT ANY PAGE CROSS REFERENCES REFER TO THE PRINT EDITION
Brief contents
List of boxes xiii

List of tables xiv
Prefacexv
1 Strategic management in perspective: a step in the professionalisation

of management 2
2 Thinking about strategy and organisational change: the implicit
assumptions distinguishing one theory from another 28
Part 1 Systemic ways of thinking about strategy and organisational

dynamics
3 The origins of systems thinking in the Age of Reason 48

4 Thinking in terms of strategic choice: cybernetic systems, cognitivist
and humanistic psychology 66
5 Thinking in terms of organisational learning and knowledge creation:
systems dynamics, cognitivist, humanistic and constructivist psychology 100
6 Thinking in terms of organisational psychodynamics: open systems
and psychoanalytic perspectives 128
7 Thinking about strategy process from a systemic perspective: using a
process to control a process 150
8 A review of systemic ways of thinking about strategy and organisational
dynamics: key challenges for alternative ways of thinking 176
9 Extending and challenging the dominant discourse on organisations:
thinking about participation and practice 202
vi Brief contents
Part 2 The challenge of complexity to ways of thinking
10 The complexity sciences: the sciences of uncertainty 238

11 Systemic applications of complexity sciences to organisations: restating
the dominant discourse 266
Part 3 Complex responsive processes as a way of thinking about

strategy and organisational dynamics
12 Responsive processes thinking: the interplay of intentions 302

13 The emergence of organisational strategy in local communicative
interaction: complex responsive processes of conversation 338
14 The link between the local communicative interaction of strategising
and the population-wide patterns of strategy 362
interaction: complex responsive processes of ideology and power relating 388
16 Different modes of articulating patterns of interaction emerging across
organisations: strategy narratives and strategy models 416
17 Complex responsive processes of strategising: acting locally on the
basis of global goals, visions, expectations and intentions for the
‘whole’ organisation over the ‘long-term future’ 456
18 Complex responsive processes: implications for thinking about
organisational dynamics and strategy 486
References 519
Index545
Contents
List of boxes xiii

List of tables xiv
Prefacexv
1 Strategic management in perspective: a step in the professionalisation

of management 2
1.1 Introduction 2
1.2 The origins of modern concepts of strategic management:
the new role of leader 6
1.3 Ways of thinking: stable global structures and fluid local interactions 15
1.4 Outline of the book 21
Further reading 26
Questions to aid further reflection 26
2 Thinking about strategy and organisational change: the implicit

assumptions distinguishing one theory from another 28
2.1 Introduction 28
2.2 The phenomena of interest: dynamic human organisations 29
2.3 Making sense of the phenomena: realism, relativism and idealism 33
2.4 Four questions to ask in comparing theories of organisational strategy
and change 39
Further reading 41
Part 1 Systemic ways of thinking about strategy and

organisational dynamics
3 The origins of systems thinking in the Age of Reason 48
3.1 Introduction 49
3.2 The Scientific Revolution and rational objectivity 51
3.3 The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant:
natural systems and autonomous individuals 52
3.4 Systems thinking in the twentieth century: the notion of human systems 57
viii Contents
3.5 Thinking about organisations and their management: science

and systems thinking 59
3.6 How systems thinking deals with the four questions 63
3.7 Summary 64
Further reading 64
4 Thinking in terms of strategic choice: cybernetic systems,
cognitivist and humanistic psychology 66
4.1 Introduction 67
4.2 Cybernetic systems: importing the engineer’s idea of self-
regulation and control into understanding human activity 68
4.3 Formulating and implementing long-term strategic plans 74
4.4 Cognitivist and humanistic psychology: the rational and the
emotional individual 82
4.5 Leadership and the role of groups 86
4.6 Key debates 87
4.7 How strategic choice theory deals with the four key questions 91
4.8 Summary 96
Further reading 98
5 Thinking in terms of organisational learning and knowledge creation:
systems dynamics, cognitivist, humanistic and constructivist psychology 100
5.1 Introduction 101
5.2 Systems dynamics: nonlinearity and positive feedback 102
5.3 Personal mastery and mental models: cognitivist psychology 105
5.4 Building a shared vision and team learning: humanistic psychology 111
5.5 The impact of vested interests on organisational learning 116
5.6 Knowledge management: cognitivist and constructivist psychology 117
5.7 Key debates 120
5.8 How learning organisation theory deals with the four key questions 122
5.9 Summary 125
Further reading 126
6 Thinking in terms of organisational psychodynamics: open systems and
psychoanalytic perspectives 128
6.2 Open systems theory 129
6.3 Psychoanalysis and unconscious processes 132
6.4 Open systems and unconscious processes 137
6.5 Leaders and groups 140
6.6 How open systems/psychoanalytic perspectives deal with the
four key questions 143
6.7 Summary 147
Further reading 148
Contents ix
7 Thinking about strategy process from a systemic perspective:

using a process to control a process 150
7.2 Rational process and its critics: bounded rationality 151
7.3 Rational process and its critics: trial-and-error action 154
7.4 A contingency view of process 158
7.5 Institutions, routines and cognitive frames 159
7.6 Process and time 161
7.7 Strategy process: a review 163
7.8 The activity-based view 165
7.9 The systemic way of thinking about process and practice 170
7.10 Summary 174
Further reading 174
8 A review of systemic ways of thinking about strategy and
organisational dynamics: key challenges for alternative ways of thinking 176
8.2 The claim that there is a science of organisation and management 178
8.3 The polarisation of intention and emergence 188
8.4 The belief that organisations are systems in the world or in the mind 191
8.5 Conflict and diversity 195
8.6 Summary and key questions to be dealt with in Parts 2 and 3 of this book 199
Further reading 200
9 Extending and challenging the dominant discourse on organisations:
thinking about participation and practice 202
9.2 Second-order systems thinking 205
9.3 Social constructionist approaches 216
9.4 Communities of practice 220
9.5 Practice and process schools 223
9.6 Critical management studies 226
9.7 Summary 228
Further reading 228
Part 2 The challenge of complexity to ways

of thinking
10 The complexity sciences: the sciences of uncertainty 238
10.2 Mathematical chaos theory 241
10.3 The theory of dissipative structures 244
x Contents
10.4 Complex adaptive systems 247

10.5 Different interpretations of complexity 257
10.6 Summary 263
Further reading 264
11 Systemic applications of complexity sciences to organisations:
restating the dominant discourse 266
11.2 Modelling industries as complex systems 267
11.3 Understanding organisations as complex systems 276
11.4 How systemic applications of complexity sciences deal with the four
key questions 289
11.5 Summary 291
Further reading 292
Part 3 Complex responsive processes as a way of thinking

about strategy and organisational dynamics
12 Responsive processes thinking: the interplay of intentions 302
12.2 Responsive processes thinking 305
12.3 Chaos, complexity and analogy 317
12.4 Time and responsive processes 326
12.5 The differences between systemic process, strong or endogenous
process and responsive processes thinking 327
12.6 Summary 335
Further reading 336
interaction: complex responsive processes of conversation 338
13.2 Human communication and the conversation of gestures:
the social act 341
13.3 Ordinary conversation in organisations 348
13.4 The dynamics of conversation 355
13.5 Leaders and the activities of strategising 358
13.6 Summary 359
Further reading 359
Contents xi
14 The link between the local communicative interaction of strategising

and the population-wide patterns of strategy 362
14.2 Human communication and the conversation of gestures: processes of
generalising and particularising 366
14.3 The relationship between local interaction and population-wide patterns 376
14.4 The roles of the most powerful 384
14.5 Summary 386
Further reading 387
interaction: complex responsive processes of ideology and power relating 388
15.2 Cult values 390
15.3 Desires, values and norms 393
15.4 Ethics and leadership 399
15.5 Power, ideology and the dynamics of inclusion–exclusion 402
15.6 Complex responsive processes perspectives on decision making 411
15.7 Summary 413
Further reading 413
16 Different modes of articulating patterns of interaction emerging
across organisations: strategy narratives and strategy models 416
16.2 The emergence of themes in the narrative patterning of ordinary,
everyday conversation 421
16.3 Narrative patterning of experience and preoccupation in the game 430
16.4 Reflecting on experience: the role of narrative and storytelling 434
16.5 Reflecting on experience: the role of second-order abstracting 436
16.6 Reasoning, measuring, forecasting and modelling in
strategic management 442
16.7 Summary 453
Further reading 453
17 Complex responsive processes of strategising: acting locally on the
basis of global goals, visions, expectations and intentions for the
‘whole’ organisation over the ‘long-term future’ 456
17.2 Strategic choice theory as second-order abstraction 459
17.3 The learning organisation as second-order abstraction 476
17.4 Institutions and legitimate structures of authority 479
17.5 Strategy as identity narrative 483
17.6 Summary 484
Further reading 485
xii Contents
18 Complex responsive processes: implications for thinking about

organisational dynamics and strategy 486
18.2 Key features of the complex responsive processes perspective 487
18.3 Refocusing attention on strategy and change 497
18.4 Refocusing attention on control and performance improvement 505
18.5 Implications for thinking about research 507
18.6 Rethinking the roles of leaders and managers 513
18.7 Summary 516
Further reading 517
References 519
Index
545
List of boxes
Box 3.1 Key concepts in Kantian thinking 57

Box 4.1 Cybernetics: main points on organisational dynamics 73
Box 4.2 Cognitivism: main points on human knowing and communicating 84
Box 4.3 Humanistic psychology: main points on human knowing and
communicating86
Box 5.1 Systems dynamics: main points on organisational dynamics 106
Box 5.2 Constructivist psychology: main points on human knowing 109
Box 6.1 General systems theory: main points on organisational dynamics 132
Box 6.2 Unconscious group processes: main points on organisational
dynamics137
Box 11.1 Complexity and evaluation 288
Box 14.1 Key points about social objects 374
Box 16.1 Facilitation as the exercise of disciplinary power 450
Box 18.1 A brief summary of complex responsive processes as the
basis for our understanding strategy 491
List of tables
Tables A.1 Classification of schools of strategy thinking 46

Tables 12.1 Comparison of different ways of thinking about causality 307
Tables 12.2 Human analogues of simulations of heterogeneous
complex systems 325
Tables 12.3 The differences between systemic process and
responsive processes 333
Tables 14.1 Some of the key differences between Mead, Elias and Bourdieu 375
Preface
The preface to the last edition of this book was written by Ralph two years after the
recession took place, and he pointed to the credit crunch as an example of one of the
central messages of this book – that there are severe limits for even the most senior
and the most powerful players in organisations, or even in societies, to choose the
future as they would like it to be. The financial recession was both unforeseen and
unwanted. Since that time the financial sector has come under severe scrutiny as one
scandal after another has been uncovered, and different banks have been variously
accused of manipulating the inter-bank lending rate (LIBOR), misselling insurance
policies to their customers, turning a blind eye to the laundering of money by crim-
inal gangs, and setting up offshore banking facilities to allow very wealthy people
to avoid paying tax. From these scandals we might infer that not only are senior
executives unable to predict the future, they are also unaware of what is going on
day to day in the institutions for which they are responsible. And to a degree, how
could they be, both because they are often responsible for huge institutions, and
also because from an orthodox understanding of leadership and management, the
abstract and ‘big picture’ view of the organisation is the most important.
The public backlash against the banks, a substantial number of which are at
least partly publicly owned in the UK, has led senior executives to declare ‘culture
change’ programmes. In many ways this demonstrates exactly the same kind of
thinking as before where the abstract and the whole are privileged, and it is assumed
that senior executives can now put right what their predecessors were not aware of
in the first place. What culture change programmes amount to is that senior execu-
tives choose a handful of highly idealised values or virtues, and then train all their
staff in the kinds of behaviour that they think will fulfil them. This is accompanied
by an apparatus for monitoring and evaluation to see that everyone is conforming,
at least as far as is detectable. A similar phenomenon is unfolding in the public
sector in the UK, particularly in the NHS after a series of scandals where hospitals
seemed to be hitting their targets, and yet missing the point. The current coalition
government has now changed the law to punish NHS employees for failing to be
‘transparent’ about lapses in care. This has led to each hospital in the UK develop-
ing weighty policy documents, developing training programmes for staff to instruct
them on the values they should have, and then designing monitoring and evaluation
schemes to police the changes. If nothing else, the culture change programmes in
banks and the public sector have generated an enormous amount of paperwork, a
heavy apparatus of scrutiny and control and a good degree of anxiety and fear of
blame amongst staff and managers.
xvi Preface
Of course, managers in the financial and public sectors should be doing some-
thing to ensure that standards are high, but exactly what they spend their time
doing, and how much of it is directed at paying attention to what is going on around
them is something we call into question in this book. To what extent is the huge
expansion of procedures helpful to what they are trying to achieve? Is a nurse more
or less likely to be caring because she is frightened of being prosecuted?
This is a textbook of ways of thinking about organisations and their manage-
ment, particularly strategic management. It calls into question what leaders and
managers spend their time doing, often following the prescriptions to be found in
what we term the ‘dominant discourse’ on management. We claim in this book that
the orthodox discourse takes for granted the assumption that change to the ‘whole’
organisation is possible, in the way we have highlighted in the paragraphs above
on culture change. These prescriptions trade mostly in abstractions and perpetuate
the idea that senior executives can control at a distance, increasingly, it seems, in
highly authoritarian ways. As an alternative, this textbook questions some of these
taken-for-granted assumptions as a prompt to think differently about what we are
doing when we try to co-operate with others to get things done. The intention is
not to offer new prescriptions for managing but to provoke deeper insight into the
traditions of Western thought which are reflected in dominant ways of understand-
ing leadership and management. What view of human psychology is implicit in
prescribing measures that managers should take to select the direction of an organ-
isation’s movement into the future? In a world in which the dominant prescriptions
for strategic management are quite clearly not delivering what they are supposed
to, we believe it is far more useful to reflect on how we are thinking, so that we
may understand more about what we are doing rather than simply continuing to
mindlessly apply the conventional wisdom.
This book, then, seeks to challenge thinking rather than simply to describe the
current state of thinking about strategy and organisational dynamics. The challenge
to current ways of thinking is presented in the contrasts that this book draws between
systemic and responsive processes ways of thinking about strategy and organisational
dynamics. While the systemic perspective is concerned with improvement and move-
ment to a future destination, responsive process thinking is concerned with complex
responsive processes of human-relating in which strategies emerge in the living pres-
ent. From this perspective, strategy is defined as the emergence of organisational and
individual identities, so that the concern is with how organisations come to be what
they are and how those identities will continue to evolve. From a responsive processes
perspective, the questions of performance and improvement have to do with partici-
pation in processes of communicative interaction, power relating and the creation of
knowledge and meaning. The challenge to ways of thinking presented in this book
also comes in the form of insights from the complexity sciences. The book will explore
the differences for organisational thinking between a way of interpreting these insights
in systemic terms and a way of interpreting them in responsive process terms. The
purpose of this book is to assist people to make sense of their own experience of life
in organisations, to explore their own thinking, because how they think powerfully
affects what they pay attention to, and so what they do. If we never challenge dom-
inant modes of thinking, we end up trapped in modes of acting that may no longer
be serving us all that well. We accept that it may well be that readers turning to this
book in the expectation of finding prescriptions for management will be disappointed.
Preface xvii
This central emphasis on ways of thinking has consequences for how this book
is structured and presented. The book questions the assumptions of the accepted
discipline of strategic management and does so by drawing on a variety of different
disciplines in social science, including sociology, psychology and philosophy. The
assumption is that the complexity of what staff in organisations are doing together
requires a variety of resources to understand it, and that subtly shaped case stud-
ies which demonstrate particularly effective ways of managing may be of limited
value. Those examples which we do bring into the book are taken from our own
experience of teaching or consultancy, or have struck us as pertinent to the broader
themes we set out: that there are general similarities in human experience, but that it
never repeats itself exactly the same. The invitation to the reader, then, is to enquire
into their own experience of leading and managing and to seek the similarities and
differences that we hope to provoke in writing this book.
The general structure of this seventh edition is the same as the sixth and we have
attempted to update our references, find new examples and bring in more recent
traditions of management scholarship which have become prominent since the
last edition. There has also been an attempt to locate the discourse on leadership
and management within broader political and economic changes during the last
30 years or so. Part 1 deals with the dominant discourse on strategic management
as in the sixth edition, and updates the chapter which attempts to review where
the dominant discourse has got to and what evidence there is for its prescriptions.
Part 1 concludes with new material on process and practice schools which share
in common some of the critiques that a responsive process perspective also has on
the dominant discourse. The final chapter of Part 1 is thus a recognition that the
dominant discourse is being challenged in a number of ways which this book seeks
to continue. Part 2 is once again concerned with the complexity sciences and how
writers on organisations use them. We have incorporated some more recent work
on organisational complexity but reach the same conclusion: namely, that most of
these writers simply re-present the dominant discourse. Part 3 continues to review
the theory of complex responsive processes as a way of thinking about strategising.
The further reading at the end of the chapters refers to work that could have been
used as reflective narratives, but as with the last edition, we have not included the
reflective narratives found in the fifth edition.
This edition is a collaboration between Ralph and Chris which has served as a fur-
ther induction for the latter in the breadth and depth of complex responsive processes
of relating. The core of the book remains Ralph’s work, which is an elaboration
over 20 years of his long and fruitful discussions with colleagues, in particular Doug
Griffin and Patricia Shaw. Chris hopes to have added some insights, to have clarified
in places and to have brought in other examples as a way of expanding and updat-
ing the ideas. Users of previous editions have made helpful comments and we are
grateful to our colleagues and other participants in the MA/Doctor of Management
programme on organisational change at the University of Hertfordshire for the con-
tribution they continue to make to how we find ourselves thinking.
Ralph Stacey
Chris Mowles
University of Hertfordshire
March 2015
Chapter 1
Strategic management
in perspective
A step in the professionalisation
of management
This chapter invites you to draw on your own experience to reflect on and consider the
implications of:
• The history of the concepts and practices • The role that business schools and con-
of strategic management. sultants have played in the development
of notions of strategic management.
• The relatively recent concern with strate-
gic management which arose only some • The persistence of a particular way of
three decades ago. understanding strategic management
despite the absence of evidence that
• The enormous emphasis that managers
strategy makes any difference.
place on tools and techniques and their
insistent demand they be provided by
academics and consultants.
This chapter is important because it presents the overall attitude taken towards the
discipline of strategic management in this book. It explains why the book does not
set out to provide prescriptions for strategic management. Instead it explains that
this is a textbook of ways of thinking about strategic management, where the pre-
scription is to take a reflective, reflexive approach. The injunction is that managers
should think about what they are doing and why they are doing it as an antidote to
mindlessly repeating outmoded theories.
1.1 Introduction
Over many years we have received many comments from readers of the first six edi-
tions of Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics, and from managers
whenever we present the ideas in seminars or work with them, which have given
Chapter 1 Strategic management in perspective 3
us some sense of what many expect to find in a textbook on strategic management.

There seems to be a general expectation of a summary of the received body of
accepted knowledge on strategic management which is already understood as that
kind of management that is concerned with the ‘big picture’ over the ‘long term’ for
the ‘whole organisation’. Most seem to distinguish strategic management from other
management activities which are concerned with the ‘day-to-day’, ‘short term’, ‘tac-
tical’ conduct of specific organisational ‘functions’ and activities. What people usu-
ally mean when they talk about the long-term, big picture for a whole organisation
is a clear view of the purpose of that organisation and the direction in which ‘it’ is
intended to ‘move’, ‘going forward into the future’, so that its ‘resources’, ‘capa-
bilities’ and ‘competences’ are ‘optimally’ ‘aligned’ to the sources of competitive
advantage in its environment as ‘the way’ to achieve ‘successful’ performance. These
activities of strategic management are normally taken to be the primary function
of an organisation’s ‘leader’, supported by his or her ‘top leadership team’ and it is
widely thought that strategic purpose, direction and alignment should be expressed
by the leader in an inspiring, easily understood statement of ‘vision and mission’.
When those lower down in an organisational hierarchy experience confusion and
uncertainty they frequently blame this on a failure of leadership, a lack of strategic
direction on the part of the top management team, or at the very least a failure of
communication down the hierarchy. What readers expect from a textbook on stra-
tegic management, therefore, is a set of ‘tools and techniques’ which can be ‘applied’
to an organisation to yield strategic ‘successes’ and avoid failures of leadership and
communication. These tools and techniques should be backed by ‘evidence’ and
illustrated by ‘case studies’ of major organisations which have achieved success
through applying them – only then can they be accepted as persuasive.
If, however, instead of simply representing the predominantly accepted tools and
techniques of strategic management, a textbook critiques or dismisses them, then
there is a powerful expectation on the part of many readers that a useful textbook
will propose new tools and techniques to replace them in the belief that, if managers
do not have tools and techniques, they will simply have to muddle through in ways
that are completely unacceptable in a modern world. The expectation is that a useful
textbook will focus on what decision makers ‘should’ be doing to make decisions in
certain kinds of problem situations in order to ‘improve’ their organisation’s perfor-
mance. Readers want to know what action they should take in order to successfully
achieve the objectives they have selected or which have been set for them. They are
looking for how to ‘design’ the management ‘systems’ which will deliver a more or
less self-regulating form of ‘control’. In short, as in other management development
activities, readers of a textbook are looking for easily understandable ‘takeaways’
and ‘deliverables’.
We have a strong sense, then, of a powerful, coherent set of expectations on the
part of many readers, expectations which are co-created with publishers of manage-
ment books and business schools, completely taken for granted as obvious common
sense, concerning what they expect from a textbook on strategic management. In
the previous paragraphs we have placed in inverted commas those notions that most
people talking about strategic management simply take for granted as if their mean-
ings were all perfectly obvious, needing little further explanation. However, we find
it difficult to see the use of trying to present new prescriptions without exploring just
what we mean when we make such taken-for-granted assumptions. Furthermore,
4 Chapter 1 Strategic management in perspective
we find it difficult to match the continuing demand for simple tools with the major
economic and political events of the past few years. It is hard to understand how
anyone who has paid any attention to the continuing financial crises since 2008
can continue to believe that there is a clear, reliable body of knowledge on strategic
management containing prescriptive tools and techniques for its successful applica-
tion. Surely the great majority of major international banks and other commercial
organisations have not been successfully conducting strategic management over the
past few years. If there really was such a body of knowledge, then top executives in
major corporations should have known how to practise strategic management to
achieve success for each of their organisations. Since the collapse of many financial
organisations means that they clearly did not succeed, either there is no reliable
body of strategic management knowledge or most leaders and top management
teams must have been guilty of criminal neglect because they obviously did not use
the prescriptions over the past few years in a way that produces success. Further-
more, we must surely question why massive investments by governments in Western
Europe and North America in public-sector services, now governed on the basis of
private-sector management tools and techniques, have yielded such disappointing
improvements, if indeed they have yielded any significant improvement at all. If
tools and techniques for successful strategic management were actually available,
governments must have been incredibly ignorant in not applying them so as to pro-
duce more acceptable levels of improvement.
It does not seem very rational to us to simply gloss over the major problem-
atic events of the past few years and continue to take it for granted that there is a
reputable body of knowledge on strategic management which provides prescriptive
tools and techniques that do lead to success. The disquiet with received management
wisdom in the light of recent history is compounded when we realise that, despite
the claims that there is a science of organisation and management, there is no body
of scientifically respectable evidence that the approaches, tools and techniques put
forward in most textbooks do actually produce success (see Chapter 8). As soon as
one accepts that the events of the past few years and the lack of scientific evidence
cast doubt on the received wisdom on strategic management, the door opens to real-
ising that ‘change’ and ‘innovation’ which most of us regard as positive, such as the
development of the Internet and the many uses to which it is being put, also cannot
be explained by the taken-for-granted view of strategic management, because most
of these ‘creative’ ‘innovations’ seem to have emerged without any global strategic
intention or any organisation-wide learning process.
In view of such global experience and the lack of evidence, this book sets out quite
explicitly and quite intentionally to contest the expectations which many readers
bring to it. Starting with the first edition of this book, published in 1993, Ralph
began questioning and countering the set of expectations we have described above
for reasons similar to those presented above, but still there are those who criticise
the book because it does not produce the expected tools and techniques. So, we
feel the need to state very clearly right at the beginning that this is not a textbook
which simply summarises an accepted body of knowledge on strategic management
but, instead, seeks to critique it; it is not a book which simply sets out alternative
schools of strategic management for readers to choose between, but rather seeks
to identify the taken-for-granted assumptions underlying each school; and it is cer-
tainly not a book which provides or supports tools and techniques for successful
strategic management, but instead invites reflection on what the insistence on tools
and techniques is all about. This is, therefore, a textbook of the ways of think-
ing that underlie the summaries of strategic management, the alternative schools of
strategic management and the tools and techniques of strategic management. Our
primary concern is not simply with what strategic management is according to dif-
ferent schools and perspectives or with what they prescribe for success, but, much
more important, it is with how we are thinking when we subscribe to particular
definitions, schools and perspectives and accept particular tools and techniques. The
key interest in this book is the taken-for-granted assumptions we make when we
suggest a particular view on strategic management or recommend particular tools
and techniques. The concern is not with the supposed tools and techniques of stra-
tegic management but with how we are thinking when we suggest such tools and
techniques. Indeed, the concern is with what kinds of taken-for-granted assumptions
we are making when we think that management in any form is about tools and
techniques at all.
In thinking about how we are thinking about strategic management, we inevitably
find ourselves asking how we have come to think in the particular ways we have. In
other words, the reflexive attitude underlying this textbook is essentially concerned
with the history of thought. When did we start to think about strategy as the direc-
tion an organisation moves in? When and in what circumstances did we start to
think of strategy as a key function of leadership having to do with visions? When
and why did we develop the modern fixation on management tools and techniques?
What this textbook does, then, is to review and summarise the body of knowledge
on ways of thinking about strategic management and how this body of knowledge
has evolved.
But why should we bother with the ways we have come to think? What is the ben-
efit for busy executives whose primary concern is action? For us, the needs and the
benefits are obvious and clear. Without reflecting on how and why we are thinking in
the way we currently do, we find ourselves mindlessly trapped in repeating the same
ineffective actions. Already, after the collapse and rescue of financial institutions in
the 2007 to 2009 period, we see investment banks and management consultancies
once more beginning to fuel waves of mergers and acquisitions as well as continuing
to be rewarded with huge bonuses for employing the ‘talent’ for taking the kinds of
risks which produced the collapse of the past few years. In the past three decades
there have been major ‘reforms’ of public-sector organisations in Western Europe
which have involved introducing the ubiquitous tools and techniques deployed in
the private sector, along with a commitment to introducing market mechanisms.
Despite widespread acceptance that the results of these reforms are at the very best
mixed, there is little evidence of a major re-think in modes of public-sector govern-
ance. It is in order to escape being trapped in mindless repetitive action that this
textbook focuses on the underdeveloped concern with thinking about organisations
and their management.
For us, nothing could be more practical than a concern with how we are thinking
and we can think of little more important for organisational improvement than hav-
ing leaders and managers who can and do actually reflect upon what they are doing
and why they are doing it. Our argument is that if they adopt such a reflective, reflex-
ive stance they will find themselves doing things differently in ways that neither they
nor we can know in advance. If this book does finally point to a ‘tool or technique’
it is to the most powerful ‘tool or technique’ available to managers, indeed to any

human being, and that is the self-conscious capacity to take a reflective, reflexive
attitude towards what they are doing. In other words, the most powerful ‘tool’ any
of us has is our ability to think about how we are thinking – if only we would use it
more and not obscure it with a ready reliance on fashionable tools and techniques
which often claim to be scientific even though there is no supporting evidence.
The other half of the main title of this book, Organisational Dynamics, signals
our claim that an inquiry into thinking about strategic management needs to be
placed in the context of what people in organisations actually do, rather than with
the main pre-occupation of the strategic management literature which is with what
managers are supposed to do but mostly do not seem to be actually doing. The term
‘group dynamics’ refers to the nature of interactions between people in a group and
to the patterns of stability and change these interactions produce over time in the
behaviour of people in a group. Organisational dynamics has a meaning close to
this – it refers to the nature of interactions between people in an organisation and to
the stable and changing patterns of behaviour these interactions produce over time,
some aspects of which might be referred to as ‘strategic’. In other words, the title
of this book signals that it is concerned with ways of thinking about strategic man-
agement located in the context of thinking more widely about what people actually
think, feel and do in organisations. And what we think, feel and do is always reflec-
tive of the communities we live in and their historically evolved ways of doing and
thinking. Notions of strategic management are not simply there – they have emerged
in a social history. So consider first what the origins of notions of strategic manage-
ment are and then how we might characterise rather different ways of thinking about
such notions.
1.2 The origins of modern concepts of strategic management: the new

role of leader
The origin of the English word strategy lies in the fourteenth-century importation of
the French word stratégie, derived from the Greek words strategia meaning ‘office
or command of a general’, strategos meaning ‘general’, and stratus plus agein where
the former means ‘multitude, army, expedition’ and the latter means ‘to lead’.
Strategy, therefore, originally denoted the art of a general and, indeed, writers on
modern strategic management sometimes refer to its origins in the Art of War by
the Chinese general Sun Tzu, written some 2,500 years ago, and in On War by the
Prussian general and military historian von Clausewitz, written nearly 200 years
ago. The claim is that the concept of strategy, understood to be a plan of action for
deploying troops devised prior to battle, as opposed to tactics which refer to the
actual manoeuvres on the battlefield, was borrowed from the military and adapted
to business where strategy was understood as the bridge between policy or high-
level goals and tactics or concrete actions. This location of the origins of strategy
in a military setting fits well with the rather romantic view of leader as hero which
has developed over the past few decades in the ‘dominant discourse’ on organisa-
tions and their management, where by dominant discourse we mean ‘the accepted
way that management gets talked about’. However, the origins of strategy might
not be so romantic. At least in the Byzantine Empire, which existed for more than
1,000 years, the strategos, or general, had other important functions to do with gov-
erning the area under his control, particularly those of ensuring the conduct of the
population census and the listing of wealth to provide the information essential for
collecting taxes. In other words, the strategos was very much concerned with civil
governance and policy. The word policy also entered the English language from the
French word policie meaning ‘civil administration’, which in turn originated in the
Greek polis meaning ‘city state’ and politeia meaning ‘state administration’. From
the fifteenth century onwards, ‘policy’ meant ‘a way of management’, or a ‘plan of
action’, combining high-level goals, acceptable procedures and courses of action,
all meant to guide future decisions. It is more realistic to regard notions of strategy
in modern organisations as expressions of more mundane, evolving modes of civil
administration than of swashbuckling military deployments. The next question,
then, is just when notions of business policy and strategy became evident in the dis-
course about the management of modern organisations, particularly business firms.
During the nineteenth century joint stock/limited liability corporations developed
as legal forms, which made it much easier to raise finance for commercial ventures.
Instead of having partners fully liable for all the losses an enterprise incurred, a
joint stock company/limited liability corporation could raise finance from share-
holders whose potential loss was limited to what they paid for their shares. This
development meant that the owners (shareholders) of organisations and those who
ran them (managers) became separate groups of people, in fact, different classes. As
agents of the owners, managers were often criticised by shareholders when financial
returns were below expectations, and when they tried to increase returns they were
increasingly cast as villains by workers during frequent periods of industrial unrest.
Khurana (2007) has carefully documented how this situation led to a quite inten-
tional search in the USA for an identity on the part of the new managerial class, an
identity which was to be secured by establishing a professional status linked to the
prestigious disciplines of the natural sciences. Management was to be presented as a
science, and a science of organisation was to be developed. Professions such as med-
icine and engineering were characterised by institutions which defined membership,
established codes of ethics, encouraged research and professional development and
often published professional journals. Professionals were educated at research-based
universities. As part of the professionalisation of management, therefore, the first
business school was set up at Wharton University in the USA in 1881 and this was
followed by the founding of increasing numbers of university-based business schools
in the ensuing decades. At much the same time, the need to hold managers legally
accountable to shareholders resulted in legislation on public reporting of corporate
activities and further legislation seeking to regulate the growth and financing of
limited liability companies. These requirements for increasingly onerous reporting
procedures created the need for financial and other surveys of companies, so creating
a market for accounting/auditing firms, for engineering consultants and eventually
management consultants. In addition to business schools, therefore, other aspects of
the professionalisation of management were displayed in the development of profes-
sional membership institutions, professional educational organisations, and profes-
sional accounting, auditing and consulting bodies.
So, by the early years of the twentieth century, a managerial class, or in more
modern terms a managerial community of practice (Wenger, 1998), had developed,
particularly in the USA, which encompassed not simply hierarchies of managers

running corporations but also management consultants and other advisers, as well
as those concerned with the development of organisations and their managers, such
as business school academics, wealthy capitalist philanthropists and government
policy advisers.
Any community of practice engages in joint activities which develop a collective
identity and they accomplish these identity-forming activities in ongoing conversa-
tion in which they negotiate what they are doing and how they are making sense of
what they are doing with each other and with members of the wider society of which
they are part. It is in conversation that members of a community become who they
are. The form of such conversation is thus of central importance because, in estab-
lishing what it is acceptable for people to talk about in a community, and how it is
acceptable to talk, the conversational form, or discourse, establishes people’s relative
power positions and therefore who they are and what they do together. Every such
community of practice is characterised by a dominant discourse: the most accept-
able way to converse, which reflects power positions supported by ideologies. The
dominant management discourse is reflected in how managers usually talk together
about the nature of their managerial activity. It is also reflected in the kind of organ-
isational research that attracts funding from research bodies, the kind of papers that
prestigious research journals will publish, and the kind of courses taught at business
schools, in the textbooks they use and in organisational training and development
activities. However, evolving communities of practice are usually not simply mono-
lithic power structures (as in fascism) with rigid ideologies brooking no dissension
(as in cults). Most communities of practice are also characterised by some resistance
to, or criticism of, the dominant discourse. A community of practice can change in
the tension between the dominant discourse and the critique of it. Understanding a
community of practice, therefore, requires understanding its forms of dominant dis-
course and the kind of dissension this gives rise to, the key debates characterising its
conversation and how conflict generated by such debate is handled. The operation
of the professional bodies of the management community described above provides
an essential source of information on how the dominant discourse on organisations
and their management has evolved. The most vocal of these professional bodies have
probably been the business schools and management consultancies. The changes in
business school curricula for educating managers and the changing composition of
management consultancy work, therefore, provide an illuminating insight into the
evolution of the dominant management discourse over the twentieth century.
By the 1920s business schools in the USA had developed three fairly distinct mod-
els of the curriculum for educating managers. First, some business schools delivered
curricula devoted to training managers for jobs in specific industries – say, operations
managers in steel manufacturing. Second, other business schools focused on business
functions, providing courses in accounting, finance, business correspondence and
sometimes history and some social sciences. Third, and this was particularly evident
in the small group of elite business schools such as Wharton and Harvard, there
was a focus on a science of administration for general managers, covering scientific
management as in Taylorism, accounting, economics of the political, historical, insti-
tutional kind rather than the neo-classical analysis found in economics faculties, and
training in the exercise of judgement rather than of routine procedures. In this third
development there was an emphasis on the social purpose of business activity and on
the presentation of managers as professionals whose purpose was the stewardship of

society’s resources. Such an identity as professional stewards of society’s resources
was a powerful counter to the accusations of workers that managers were their
enemies and also a useful power shift in relation to shareholders. A list of courses
in business school curricula of all types shows that over the 1920s and 1930s there
were very few courses in business policy and none in strategy, strategic manage-
ment, corporate planning or even planning: economics was far less important than
the social sciences and there was a strong interest in ethics (Khurana, 2007). Then,
if we look at the kind of work that accounting and consulting firms were doing,
we find that it was primarily to do with legal reporting requirements and the infor-
mation required for this, studies of reporting structures and forms of organisation
and engineering and financial assessments for specific, large investment projects. So,
any notion of strategic management in organisations as we now understand it is a
post–Second World War phenomenon, certainly not one stretching back to ancient
Chinese, or even more recent Prussian, generals.
The Second World War was to have a major impact on the identity of managers –
the management of organisations became a key aspect of winning a war that
depended as much on the ability to organise the manufacture and transport of sup-
plies as on the ability to direct military confrontations. During the war, therefore,
governments found it necessary to take seriously the techniques of management and
administration, and in the USA the government turned to the business schools to
address the difficulties of administering a war economy, including the tasks of col-
lecting statistics and other information and developing techniques for co-ordinated
decision making across many different organisations. This led to the development
of techniques such as linear programming and systems analysis, which led later to
computer simulations, network analysis, queuing theory and cost-accounting sys-
tems. There was progress in statistics and statistical sampling, as well as in survey
methods and focus groups, under the pressures of assuring the quality of armaments.
Engineers developed the theory of systems to provide forms of self-regulating con-
trol. A new and more rational conception of the managerial role using the modern
techniques therefore developed during the war.
After the war, the managers who had acquired this kind of analytical expertise
for the war effort were available in their thousands to work on social and economic
reconstruction in business corporations and consulting firms, such as McKinsey,
where they applied the new techniques to organisational problems. Management
thus focused much more narrowly than before the war on the scientific manager
who used models and analytical techniques and designed and manipulated systems.
Management was equated with setting objectives, designing systems for meeting
them, planning, forecasting and controlling. Managers were described as ‘systems
designers’, ‘information processors’ and ‘programmers’ regulating the interface of
the organisation and its environment in accordance with cybernetic systems theory.
The rapid growth in corporate size and the rise of the conglomerate were character-
ised by a multiplicity of managers removed from the grass roots of the organisation’s
activities and who felt the need for models, maps and techniques that would enable
them to exert control from a distance. This need for techniques of modelling, map-
ping and measuring to enable the taking of a generalised macro view from a distance
in order to apply some degree of control had already been faced over a century
before by tax collectors and other administrators of the business of the modern state.
In a sense, post-war organisational managers were importing systemic practice from

public administration while at the same time bringing more sophisticated models
and techniques to both private and public administration.
In addition, in the USA the government provided education for returning soldiers,
and this together with the need for more managers produced an explosive demand
for places at business schools which were to train managers in the new techniques.
The Association to Advanced Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) sought to
improve the quality of business education, and philanthropic foundations, such as
the Carnegie Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation,
funded business schools and so came to have an important impact on how they
developed. These foundations wanted to raise the academic standards of the business
schools by getting teachers at business schools to focus, in both their research and
teaching activities, on techniques for solving real, complex problems using quantita-
tive methods. Neo-classical micro-economic analysis now became more prominent
than the social sciences because it provided analytical tools. The Ford Foundation
was strongly of the view that there was now a science of management which would
enable managers to make decisions solely on rational grounds using techniques such
as decision analysis and game theory, making any appeal to intuition, judgement
and ethics unnecessary. It was believed that this management science could be taught
at business schools by a faculty without business experience but who were expert
in decision-making techniques. Managers were regarded as technicians and the role
of the faculty at the business schools was that of transferring to managers the
decision-making and control techniques that they would need. The much changed
conception of the management role brought with it a complete orientation towards
profit. The ordinary manager’s primary role was to perform the tasks required to
maximise profits for shareholders. It was believed that the new management tech-
niques could be applied in any organisation of any size so that experience in a par-
ticular industry was not necessary – expertise in decision making and control was all
that was needed. But at the top of the hierarchy there was a CEO who many have
described, in this period, as a kind of industrial statesman who worked closely with
outside bodies such as government ministers, politicians and regulatory authorities,
while managers lower down in the hierarchy were simply technicians applying the
techniques of decision making and control that would maximise profits.
By the 1960s the AACSB was only accrediting standardised MBAs based on
disciplines such as finance and quantitative analysis, including neo-classical micro-
economics. Business schools began to experience a growing schism between faculty
who lacked business experience and focused on research and techniques, and stu-
dents who stressed their need for practical application. By the time we get to the
late 1960s and early 1970s some business schools were trying to meet the need for
integrating the various specialised courses they were teaching into an overall view of
management and they did this by introducing capstone courses on business policy. In
addition, in the 1960s specialist strategy consultants such as the Boston Consulting
Group and Bain & Company grew rapidly (McKenna, 2006). By the 1970s inde-
pendent management consultants had also become very important in government
administration and advice. Consultants found a lucrative market in advising, first
universities, then religious institutions and then hospitals, on their organisational
structures and strategies. So, by the 1960s consultancies were involved in most kinds
of organisation in giving advice on business policy, corporate planning and strategy,
and during this period management consultancy successfully established itself as a

profession with its own institutions.
The period from the end of the Second World War to the economic crisis of the
early 1970s was a period of more or less sustained company growth and economic
prosperity and managers came to be thought of as professional problem solvers who
employed a body of scientific knowledge to make rational decisions. This was the
period in which, first, business policy and then corporate planning courses became
more and more common in business schools – it came to be held that the crucial role
of the CEO was that of defining corporate goals and creating strategy. The manage-
ment consultancies developed the rapidly growing markets for advice on formulat-
ing and implementing corporate strategies, which increasingly included merger and
acquisition activities. The concern with corporate strategy therefore generated enor-
mous business for accounting and auditing firms, as well as investment bankers and
management consultants; and of course this was all part of increasing activities to
do with strategic planning in American corporations: it was estimated that by 1966
the majority of American manufacturing firms had some type of planning system
(Brown et al. 1969) and much the same kind of result was produced by later studies
of the situation in the mid-1970s (Fulmer and Rue, 1973; Haspeslagh, 1982; Kono,
1983). However, there were very few studies which examined the effects of strategic
planning on corporate success (see Chapter 8). The few studies there were produced
fragmentary and conflicting results (Rue and Fulmer, 1973). The story was much the
same in Europe. In the UK the first business school, London Business School, was set
up in 1964. A Long Range Planning Society was set up in London and the first issue
of its journal, Long Range Planning, was published in 1968. In France the business
school INSEAD was set up in 1957. In Switzerland IMI was founded in Geneva by
Alcan Aluminium in 1946 and IMEDE was founded in Lausanne in 1957 by Nestlé.
IMD was created in 1990 in a merger between IMI and IMEDE.
So, by the time we get to the early 1970s, corporate planning was very much a
central part of the dominant discourse on management, but despite the claims this
discourse made to a scientific status it could produce no reliable body of evidence to
support the application of corporate planning techniques. This was the era, in both
North America and Europe, of the growth of large corporate planning departments
in commercial and industrial enterprises of any consequence. The growth of these
departments, as well as the management consultancies, accounting firms, informa-
tion technology advisers, investment banks and business schools, created a huge
demand for economists. Ralph completed his studies in economics in the late 1960s
and had the choice of planning-type jobs in the UK in Shell, Ford and British Steel,
having discounted the possibility of applying to the World Bank or looking for a
post in the USA. The future seemed rosy if you were an economist, particularly one
educated, as he had been, at universities such as the London School of Economics
which emphasised mathematics, statistics and econometric modelling. He took a job
in 1970 forecasting steel demand at British Steel and then moved a short time later to
the corporate planning department of a large international construction company,
John Laing, which had been founded nearly a century before. He continued to work
there until 1984 and then spent a year at an investment house in the City of London
before taking up an academic career.
However, the apparently rosy picture for economists and their techniques was
indeed short-lived. In the early 1970s oil prices shot up and the world economy
moved into significant decline, accompanied by alarming increases in inflation rates

around the globe. The 1970s were difficult, turbulent years in both economic and
political terms. The limits to our ability to forecast what would happen next became
painfully obvious and the whole project of corporate, strategic planning was called
into question. The Club of Rome, established in 1968, called for limits to economic
growth and this call became more influential in the 1970s. Large companies began
to drastically reduce their corporate planning departments and the armies of econ-
omists had to find other forms of employment unless, as Ralph did in continuing to
work at John Laing, they managed to develop activities in existing corporate plan-
ning departments that other managers found useful.
By the end of the decade, the whole activity of corporate planning was com-
ing in for major criticism, as indeed was the whole scientific, technical approach
taught by business schools and installed by management consultants. Abernathy and
Hayes (1980) of Harvard Business School wrote an influential article blaming the
USA’s lack of competitiveness against Japan on a highly rational, technique-oriented
approach to management. This was followed by other influential books (for exam-
ple, by management consultants Pascale and Athos, 1981) which compared manage-
ment methods in the USA and Japan, finding the latter with its emphasis on wider
discussion, teams and more inclusive decision making far superior to American
approaches based on rational tools and techniques applied in highly hierarchical
ways. Then there was a very influential book, with much the same message, by the
management consultants Peters and Waterman (1982), which identified what they
claimed from their research were the key practices of successful businesses which
included an emphasis on culture, teams, leadership and visions. Corporate planning
became a rather taboo term and instead people spoke of strategic management,
now understood as an essential competence of visionary, inspirational leaders rather
than a purely techniques-driven, rational activity. This shift was expressed in a still
ongoing debate between rational planners and those who presented the notion of the
learning organisation. In Chapter 8 we will mention a famous instance of this debate
in an exchange between Ansoff and Mintzberg.
During the 1980s the field of strategy emerged as a particular form of manage-
ment and a separate field of study not only in the private sector but in the pub-
lic sector too as politicians preached and implemented what became known as the
‘managerialist’ form of corporate governance, which found its public manifestation
in the form of new public management (NPM). The professional status of strategic
planners is indicated by the founding of the Strategic Management Society at an
initial meeting in London in 1981, with officers elected at a second conference held
in Montreal in 1982, and a constitution approved at the third meeting in Paris in
1983. The Strategic Management Journal (SMJ) has, since its inception in 1980,
been the official journal of the Strategic Management Society presented as an inter-
national institution, although one heavily influenced by academics in the USA where
its administration is located.
At much the same time, and coterminous with the rise of a new economic ortho-
doxy in the 60s and 70s generally referred to as ‘neo-liberalism’, which privi-
leges the role of markets in solving human problems, developments in the field of
finance revolutionised teaching at elite business schools. These schools now trained
not general managers but professional investors and financial engineers for the
investment banks, private equity and hedge funds and management consultancies.
Another random document with
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has mixed up some tradition of this ancient work in Nubia. At any
rate, whatever be the truth about Lake Mœris, his account proves
beyond all question that the idea of a Reservoir was familiar to the
ancient Egyptians.
The tradition of a Reservoir somewhere on the upper waters of
the Nile lingered long in Egypt. There is a curious reference to it in a
book of travel by F. Vansleb, a Dutchman who visited Egypt about
the year 1670. The fertility of the Nile flood is caused, he says, by a
fall of dew, which usually takes place on June 17, just after the
appearance of the ‘green’ water. This dew purifies the foul water, and
makes it swell by fermentation. ‘Some of the country,’ however, he
proceeds, ‘that are ignorant of the true causes of this increase,
imagine that it proceeds from a large pond in Ethiopia in the river
itself, which the Abyssins begin to open about June 12, and let the
water out by degrees, more and more till September 14, by which
time they begin to shut it again. But this is a foolish fancy of the
Copties.’
We have seen how the tradition of Lake Mœris fascinated
Mehemet Ali; but the methods of Haroun-al-Raschid were not suited
to solid engineering works, as the history of the Barrage too plainly
shows. None of his descendants, with the exception of the Khedive
Ismail, had the wit to conceive or the ability to execute such an
undertaking, and Ismail’s fantastic imagination was fully occupied in
other directions. Fortunately for Egypt, the project had to wait until
the success of the Barrage made the time ripe for its execution, and
until skilful brains and strong hands were ready to plan and carry it
out in the most efficient manner possible.
There were three problems to be faced: first, Where could such a
Reservoir be erected? second, What arrangements could be devised
to avoid the danger of large silt deposits, which would soon seriously
diminish the capacity of the Reservoir, and, if allowed to accumulate,
render it in no long time entirely useless? third, Supposing that the
difficulties of site and design could be overcome, where was the
money to be found? During the first years of the British occupation,
while Egypt was still painfully struggling upwards from the abyss of
bankruptcy into which she had been cast by the mad whirlwind of
extravagance in Ismail’s reign, it was no time for the inception of
original works on a grand scale. But in 1890 the matter became an
affair of practical politics, and was at last seriously taken in hand.
Meantime discussion had been raging as to the best locality for the
Reservoir. An American gentleman, Mr. Cope Whitehouse, took up
the case of the Wadi Rayan, a depression in the desert to the south-
west of the Fayoum. This, he maintained, was the real site of the
ancient Lake Mœris, and here the Reservoir ought to be. He had no
professional knowledge, and he was utterly wrong in his ideas; but
his vehement method of controversy kept the subject thoroughly
alive. The whole land was filled with his clamour, and every expert
was forced to give his own views in self-defence. The debate served
a useful purpose. Gradually it came to be recognised that the river-
bed itself was the proper place for storing the water by means of a
Dam. Authorities differ as to whom belongs the credit of first making
this suggestion, or, rather, of first reviving the tradition of the past;
but it seems pretty clear that Sir Samuel Baker suggested the
construction of a Dam at the first cataract at Assouan as far back as
1867.
However that may be, in 1890 the Government took the matter
up, and charged Mr. W. Willcocks with the task of examining the river
north of Wadi Halfa, reporting upon the best available site for the
Dam, and preparing a design for it. After a careful survey, his plans
were completed in 1894, and his design for a Reservoir at Assouan
was then submitted to an International Committee of Engineers,
consisting of Sir Benjamin Baker, M. Boulé, and Signor Torricelli. Mr.
Willcocks’ plans were, with some modifications, accepted by a
majority of the Commission, and to him belongs the honour of having
designed the Dam. The selection of the Assouan site solved the first
of the three difficulties. There is at this point an extensive outcrop of
granite clean across the valley of the Nile, which it was thought
would give sound rock everywhere at a very convenient level for the
foundations of the Dam. Moreover, the trough of the river above the
cataract and a long way south of it is exceptionally deep, and this
makes it possible for a greater amount of water to be stored up
behind the Dam. But the prime necessity was for a solid foundation.
Elsewhere in Egypt the bed of the Nile is composed of shifting
sands, on which it would have been impossible to build a Dam
capable of holding up so great a head of water.
Mr. Willcocks’ design solved the second difficulty, the problem of
constructing a Dam strong enough for the purpose, and yet of
avoiding the danger of filling up the Reservoir by too great
accumulations of silt. The other great Dams in the world, as, for
instance, that built by Sir Arthur Cotton on the Godavery River, in
India, are solid throughout. They are planned so that the rising flood
shall pass freely over the top of them. But the Assouan Dam is of a
type previously unknown, and its success ought to stimulate
perennial irrigation in many parts of the world where such projects
have hitherto proved failures. Its principle is that even the highest
flood shall pass, not over it, but through it. To this end it is pierced
with 180 openings, which are like tunnels in the great mass of
masonry. The openings are controlled by powerful sliding-gates
worked from above. During the months of the flood every gate will be
up, and the ‘red’ water, carrying all its heavy burden of silt, will pass
through without impediment. Later in the year, about the end of
November, when the flood has subsided and very much less matter
is carried in suspension, the sluice-gates begin to be gradually
closed, and by the end of February the Reservoir is full, without
having affected the normal discharge of the river in any appreciable
degree. From April to July the water thus stored up is let out by
degrees for employment, according to the state of the river and the
requirement of the crops. By the time the next flood begins to come
down all the stored water will have passed out, and every sluice will
be once more open to give free passage to the rising stream.
Although the Nile in December and January carries an insignificant
amount of sediment compared to that brought down in August and
September, it yet brings down a very considerable quantity, far
greater than most other rivers at any time, and quite enough to go a
long way towards silting up the bed of the Reservoir, if it was allowed
to remain. But for this the river provides its own remedy: every year
the force of the flood will act like a gigantic broom, sweeping the floor
of the Reservoir. The sluices, arranged in sets of five, are distributed
at different levels, according to the formation of the river-bed on the
upstream side, so as to facilitate this process to the utmost. During
the months of the inundation the Nile at Assouan pours down for
weeks together a volume of 10,000 tons of water per second, and
sometimes as much as 14,000 or 15,000 tons per second. The rush
of this stupendous mass is sufficient to assure us that there will be
no silting up of the Reservoir.
Two of the difficulties had been thus overcome, when, from a new
and unexpected quarter, a storm sprang up, which very nearly
brought to a standstill the rising fabric of Egyptian prosperity. The
project of the Reservoir would have raised the level of the water, and
held up the river above the Dam to a head of 100 feet; this would
have involved the temporary submersion every year of the island of
Philæ, with its famous Temple of Isis, Pharaoh’s Bed, and other
monuments. A terrific hubbub arose. Archæological and antiquarian
societies, which until then had sometimes belittled the monuments of
Philæ as belonging to an inferior period, poured in their protests.
People who had never heard of Philæ before, but who were none the
less influential for that, joined in the outcry. Diplomatists, whose one
desire was to embarrass our progress in Egypt, took up the cause of
Art with a will. These champions of humanity at large forgot the poor
fellaheen, to whom the extra water means all the difference between
misery and happiness; nothing would satisfy them but the complete
abandonment of the project. The engineers fought stoutly in the
interests of Egypt; they offered to raise the whole of the monuments
bodily, or to transport them to the neighbouring island of Bigeh; but,
though they saved the Dam, the original design was lost, and the
Dam to-day is 33 feet lower than it ought to have been. The
foundations of Philæ have been underpinned and strengthened, the
island will only be partially submerged, and the injury to Egypt can
only be faintly estimated.
Was the sacrifice worth it? The value of Philæ lies in its beauty
more than in its antiquarian interest. No one who has witnessed
night after night the glorious sunsets on the Nile, the mysterious
charm of the changing waters, the dark belt of palms reflected in the
river below and standing out in strong contrast against the sky, the
limestone cliffs of the desert clear-cut in the dry air, and flushing pink
in the radiance of the indescribable after-glow, no one who has seen
the Temples of Karnak, could hesitate to make so small a sacrifice,
in comparison, for the sake of the river-side people. Moreover, Egypt
is rich in treasures of the past, as yet undiscovered, and wanting
only money for their development, which the Reservoir would in time
supply. And how few people visit Philæ at all! Surely, even in a
country a thousand times poorer than Egypt in artistic and
archæological interests, the well-being of the living and of the unborn
should have prevailed.
If all those who joined to swell the uproar had been really
disinterested lovers of the beautiful, there would have been small
reason to complain of their insistence. Enthusiasts can hardly be
expected to listen to the voice of reason, and Philæ has charms to
soften the heart of the most savage utilitarian. Its fate is a mournful
necessity, but it is a necessity, for the question of the Reservoir had
come to be a question of existence for Egypt. Even the advantage
gained by the opposition in lowering the height of the Dam is only a
delay. On the pylon of the Temple of Isis at Philæ is carved a huge
representation of the Pharaoh of the day, one of the most
degenerate of the Ptolemies, catching his defeated enemies by the
hair of their heads with one hand, an uplifted sword in the other. The
whole is a copy of the work of his warlike ancestors, and even as a
copy it is a delusion and a sham; for he won no victories, defeated
no enemies, and, indeed, scarcely ventured outside the walls of his
harem. The apparent victory of these lovers of Philæ, to call them by
their more honourable title, was not less delusive. Philæ is doomed.
Between half drowned and wholly drowned there is not much
difference in the case of an island, certainly not a difference worth
fighting for, and the Dam will be raised to its full height, perhaps as
soon as Egypt is ready for the extra water.
The financial difficulty remained. In spite of the prosperity of
Egypt, she is, as everyone acquainted with her history is aware,
bound hand and foot by international fetters in matters financial. The
Caisse de la Dette, founded to protect Egyptian creditors against the
dangers of bad administration, has remained to be an obstacle to
any improvements that must benefit these interests. The practical
outcome of the system is that, if the Caisse be hostile—and hostile it
has often been—no public work like the Nile Reservoir can be
carried out without the imposition of extra taxation to the amount of
double the annual expenditure required.
Time passed, the need became more pressing, but the prospects
of the Reservoir seemed further off than ever. Besides the regulation
of her water-supply, Egypt had on her hands the question of the
Soudan. From every point of view the reconquest of that province
and the upper waters of the Nile was a prime necessity; no one
could tell how long the war might last, or how great the expense
might be. It seemed impossible that she could bear the cost of two
such enterprises simultaneously, and under such circumstances her
credit would not have been sufficient to raise the capital sum
required on anything like reasonable terms. Not only so, but by the
peculiar constitution of Egyptian finance it was illegal for her to raise
a loan without the consent of the Caisse, a consent which it was
impossible to obtain.
But, fortunately for Egypt, there were a few men with clearer
vision and more faith in the future, and chief among these was Lord
Cromer. The statesman who had controlled the tangled destinies of
Egypt through so many dark years, and baffled so many tortuous
intriguers, as well as more open foes, was not the man to despair in
such a situation. In 1897 the first negotiations were quietly opened
with Sir E. Cassel. Then came the vote of the majority of the Caisse
to grant £500,000 towards the Soudan Railway, and the successful
action taken in the Courts against that vote. Everyone knows how
this seeming defeat was turned to overwhelming victory by the
decision of the English Government to grant £750,000 for the railway
on certain conditions. The enemies of England in Egypt received a
staggering blow.
But the story was not yet complete. In April, 1898, Sir E. Cassel
arrived at Cairo; in one day the details of the arrangements to
finance the Dam were settled; all that night the lawyers drafted the
necessary documents; a Council of Ministers was hastily called in
the morning, and the contracts were signed. Sir E. Cassel was to
provide the necessary funds for the execution of the work,
£2,000,000; repayment by the Egyptian Government was to be
deferred altogether for five years, and then to be spread over a
period of thirty years. The first payment of about £78,000 is included
in the Budget for 1903.
Looking back now after five years of prosperity, when Egyptian
securities have actually increased in value, while Consols
themselves have so greatly declined, it is easy to see that the
statesman and the financier were justified in their faith. But in those
days it needed a clear vision and a stout heart to calculate thirty
years ahead—nay, even five—in a country so much the sport of
international politics. The Soudan Campaign was not yet ended;
behind the dervishes there loomed vague possibilities of worse
complications. The Egyptian Government made a good bargain then,
though it would doubtless make a better now. But it was then, and
not now, that the business had to be settled.
CHAPTER VIII
THE DAM AND THE NEW BARRAGES
Once the financial difficulty was settled, no time was lost in setting to
work. As soon as the flood of 1898 began to subside, Messrs. Aird
and Co., the contractors, were busy with the foundations of the Dam.
Five years was the period allowed by the contract, but a succession
of low Niles gave unusual facilities for the work, and everything was
completed before the flood of 1902, a year before the specified time.
From its vast proportions, the Dam is infinitely more impressive to
the imagination than any other of the irrigation works in Egypt. But
from an engineering point of view its construction was a plain,
straightforward business compared with the difficulties of building a
Barrage, where the river-bed offered no more solid foundation than
shifting sands. Still, there was a moment, on the first uncovering of
the river-bed, when its fate seemed to hang in the balance. The
Assouan site had been selected principally because the outcrop of
granite, there running clean across the valley, would give, it was
thought, solid foundation at a convenient level. It was found that in
some places the rock was rotten to a depth of 40 feet. It was an
anxious moment, both from an engineering and a financial point of
view. Every foot of rotten rock meant a considerable addition to the
calculated expense, besides modifying the building plan. Once more
Lord Cromer’s strong will saved the situation. On the financial side
he stood on firm ground, and he proved as good an engineer as he
had been a financier. Solid rock was reached, and the work went
steadily forward. Ten thousand men was the usual sum of those
employed, and of these 800 were Italian stone-cutters specially
brought over to deal with the tough granite of which the Dam is built.
Granite and Portland cement are the two great materials used for
welding the fetters of the Nile.
The Dam is about one mile and a quarter in length, and at its
deepest point it is 126 feet high. Sixty-five feet of water can be held
up when the reservoir is full, and it is capable of storing about
1,200,000,000 cubic metres of water—that is to say, about the same
amount of water as passes through Assouan in a single day when
the flood is at its height. The face of the wall is a slope on the
downstream side, and its width at the bottom corresponds
approximately to its height. Seven hundred and eighty thousand
cubic yards of masonry have been used. On the western side a
ladder of four locks gives passage to boat and steamer traffic at all
seasons.
All parts of Egypt are to benefit in a greater or less degree from
the extra summer supply. The original calculation assumed an
amount to be distributed of 1,065,000,000 cubic metres. It was
allotted as follows:
Cubic Metres.
South of Assiout 170,000,000
Assiout to Cairo with the Fayoum 510,000,000
Gizeh Province 85,000,000
Lower Egypt 300,000,000
This division meant that 52,000 acres could be reclaimed to

cultivation in the Fayoum, and 120,000 acres in the Delta. Further,
south of Assiout 200,000 acres could be converted to perennial
irrigation by means of pumps upon the Nile banks. In Middle Egypt
458,000 acres could be converted to perennial irrigation, and in
Gizeh Province 106,000.
A low Nile on the average comes about once in five years, but
assuming that it happened every year, these results may be
expressed in terms of money on the basis that conversion to
perennial irrigation increases the yield per acre by £2 annually, and
that reclaimed land produces a yield valued at £5 annually. This
gives an increase of value in the annual yield:
£E
South of Assiout 420,000
Middle Egypt and Fayoum 1,176,000
Gizeh Province 212,000
Lower Egypt 600,000
Total £E2,408,000
while the direct annual gain to the State Exchequer in rental and
taxation would amount to £E378,400.
This does not exhaust the full extent of the benefits of the
Reservoir on which a money value can be placed. For some time
Egypt had been living beyond her real resources in the matter of
water. Encouraged by a series of good years, the acreage of cotton
had been greatly extended. The cotton-plant is very hardy, and can
retain its vitality for a certain period on a very scanty and irregular
supply of water. Cultivators, especially in the Delta, had taken
advantage of this quality up to the very hilt, and the annual crop had
reached an amount of 6,000,000 kantars.
Taking the not very high price of 175 piastres per kantar (1 kantar
= nearly 100 pounds), the annual value reached £10,000,000. A
season like that of 1889, when the summer supply was very low, and
not the lowest on record, would mean the loss of at least one-tenth
of this amount, and even more, in spite of the most successful
working of the Barrage, and the most careful system of rotations.
Against such a loss the Reservoir is a complete insurance, and, as a
low year cannot safely be reckoned as occurring less than once in
five years, the annual value of such insurance must be set down as
£200,000. The figures give some idea of the value of the new supply.
The estimate does not err on the side of exaggeration. It was framed
in the most cautious and conservative manner possible, and, in fact,
it would be by no means rash to put the total annual value a good
deal higher.
According to the financial arrangement, the first payment towards
defraying the cost of the works was included in the budget for 1903,
but no fresh taxation for the purpose was to be imposed till 1904,
and even then the full amount of direct benefit to the Exchequer will
not be realized till 1910. Time is thus given for the full effects of the
change to be felt, and the Reservoir will be paid for out of its own
profits. The alteration of the basin lands to the new system must take
some time, and their cultivators will thus be given full opportunity to
familiarize themselves with the new methods of agriculture which
they will have to employ.
The scheme of distribution allotted nearly 50 per cent. of the
Reservoir supply to the Fayoum and the province between Assiout
and Cairo. Just south of Assiout is the head of the great Ibrahimiyah
Canal, which not only supplies these provinces, but also feeds the
Bahr Yusuf, which waters the Fayoum. It was necessary, in view of
the increased discharge, to widen the upper reaches of this canal,
and to provide it with a new regulating head. But more than this was
required to insure its receiving the proper proportion of water
whenever the sluice-gates of the Dam were opened. Accordingly, at
the same time that the foundations of the Dam at Assouan were laid,
a new Barrage was begun at Assiout just downstream of the head of
the Ibrahimiyah Canal.
In principle the Assiout Barrage is exactly the same as that at the
point of the Delta, and the difficulties of construction were also
exactly similar, for in both cases the foundations had to be laid on
the same shifting sands, and as each section of the work was
undertaken a portion of the river had to be diverted from its course
by means of temporary earthen dams. The shifting nature of the
river-bed, the almost personal malignity of the water, constantly
bursting through in countless springs, each of which had to be
separately dealt with and suppressed, called forth the highest
exercise of engineering skill. But the experience gained in the long
struggle with the imperfections of the earlier Barrage infallibly told its
tale. Every difficulty was successfully encountered, and the Assiout
Barrage was completed by the summer of 1902, and was able to
hold up the 10 feet of water required of it, without any failure, at the
first attempt.
The visible part of this Barrage, which is just over half a mile in
length, consists of a viaduct or bridge with 111 archways, each 16
feet 5 inches in width, closed by strong iron gates, working in
grooves made in the supporting piers, and raised or lowered from
above. In contrast to the Delta Barrage, it is built throughout of stone,
and not of brick. At the western end is a lock, the largest in Egypt,
through which the largest of the boats that ply upon the Nile can
easily pass. Below the water lies the strength of the structure. The
viaduct rests upon a solid platform of granite and cement, 10 feet
deep and 87 feet wide, set at a suitable depth below the bed of the
river. As a further precaution against the action of the water, there
are also below the platform two continuous lines of iron sheet-piles,
with hermetically sealed joints. With such a series of obstacles to
encounter, the danger of the water forcing its way through
underneath the Barrage is small indeed. The whole amount of
masonry used in this Barrage is 220,000 cubic yards.
The prosecution of these great works in Upper Egypt by no
means exhausted the activity of the Irrigation Department; indeed, it
would almost seem that the building of Barrages has become part of
its ordinary routine, for a third remains to be chronicled. This is the
Zifta Barrage on the Damietta branch of the Nile, halfway between
the point of the Delta and the sea. Because it lies in a district
unvisited by tourists, though very important commercially, its
construction has not been heralded by any blowing of trumpets. Yet
it is a work of the very first class, and deserves to be reckoned
among the greatest of the triumphs of the department. Built on the
same plan as the Assiout Barrage, and, like it, capable of holding up
10 feet of water, it is designed to secure a better distribution of the
supply north of the Delta Barrage. As the area of the cultivated land
extended gradually northward, it became apparent that the canal
system taking off from above the original Barrage was becoming too
long to admit of the water in times of pressure reaching the
northernmost parts of the country. There were some who held that a
second Barrage, with a new system of canals taking off from it,
should have been erected on the Damietta branch, even in
preference to the new stone weirs, which have increased the
strength and distributing power of the old one. The dispute has been
happily settled by the adoption of both projects, and with the Zifta
Barrage completed in time for the summer of 1903, and the new
supply from Assouan, the reclamation of the northern lands will go
steadily forward.
It has been already pointed out that it is almost as important to get
the water off the land as to get it on, and the proper drainage of the
Delta lands has been the necessary complement of all the new
schemes. Though eclipsed by the splendour of the Reservoir and
other creations more taking to the eye, the performance of the
engineers in this direction during the last few years has been
sufficient to make them very memorable in irrigation annals. Since
1896 about 1,000 kilometres of new drains have been dug, and
nearly as great a length of existing drains remodelled. It has cost the
Egyptian Government close upon a million of money, but that this
expenditure has not been thrown away is proved by the great rise in
the value of all the lands affected.
The Zifta Barrage cost about £500,000, the Assouan Dam and the
Assiout Barrage £3,200,000. Apart from the ordinary expenditure on
maintenance and the suppression of the corvée, the twenty years
ended 1902 have seen an expenditure of £9,000,000 devoted to
irrigation and drainage. There could be no greater proof of the
wisdom of those who have directed Egyptian policy during that
period. However pressed they have been at different times by
demands for immediate expenditure on other objects when
resources were low, they have always adhered steadily to a policy of
liberality towards public works likely to be of a remunerative
character. In no other country do economic laws work out their
results with greater directness and certainty. Reproductive
expenditure is really worthy of its name, and brings its visible and
tangible fruit almost without a moment’s delay. As they have sown,
so have they reaped. There can be no comparison between this
expenditure and the benefits it has conferred upon Egypt. Three
salient examples may be given to point the force of these remarks.
First, the works undertaken by Colonel Ross to improve the
system of basin irrigation in Upper Egypt. 1877 was a year of very
low flood, and nearly 1,000,000 acres were sharaki—that is, entirely
exempted from taxation owing to absence of irrigation. In 1899, a
worse year—in fact, the lowest flood of the century—the sharaki
lands were no more than 250,000 acres, a result mainly due to the
successful reforms carried out by Colonel Ross in 1888-89. 1902
was a year very similar to 1899, and the sharaki acreage was no
more than 140,000 acres.
Second, the case of the Assiout Barrage. The work was finished a
year before the time named in the contract. On August 15, 1902, the
usual date of filling the basins, the flood was exceptionally low, and it
was decided to lower the gates of the Barrage. By so doing the
water-level of the canals was raised by 1½ metres, an increase
which was more than sufficient to avert the threatened disaster. The
money value of the crops thus secured to the land-owners of the
Fayoum and Middle Egypt is estimated at not less than £600,000.
The cost of the new works at Assiout, including the new regulator on
the Ibrahimiyah Canal, was about £875,000. Thus, in the first year of
their existence they nearly repaid their whole cost, and that, too, as it
were, by a sidewind; for the Barrage’s real function is to hold up the
river in the low summer season, and not in the flood.
Third, the case of the Assouan Reservoir itself. The summer
supply in 1903 has been the lowest on record; the discharge at
Assouan has fallen to 200 cubic metres per second. By means of the
Reservoir this supply has been actually doubled. Had the flood been
late in coming down, it would have been impossible to distribute the
water at so liberal a rate. The Soudan gauges gave warning that an
early flood was to be expected, and thus the authorities were able to
calculate with certainty, and open the sluice-gates with much greater
freedom. But the calculation would have been a useless exercise
unless there had been a store to draw upon. At the lowest
computation the loss avoided may be reckoned at a couple of
millions.
The administrators of Egypt have had many difficulties and
obstacles in their path, but to be able to point to such results is a
great compensation; their efforts need no formal monument.
CHAPTER IX
THE INAUGURATION OF THE RESERVOIR
December 10, 1902, was the official date of the inauguration of the
Reservoir, a memorable day in the history of Egypt, and worthy to be
marked with red even in the unchanging Mohammedan calendar.
The making of the Dam has been a great time for Assouan. The
town has thriven and prospered beyond all knowledge since the
days—not so very long ago—when two British battalions occupied
the barracks on the hill overlooking the river to the south. The
barracks are crumbling to pieces now, and only one or two
blockhouses remain as memorials of the past state of siege and fear
of dervish raids. The tide of war has rolled far away and spent itself
utterly in remote corners. The whole of the Soudan lies between
Assouan and the frontier of any possible enemy. Even the yellow fort
is untenanted save by a few policemen. True, for four years an army
of 10,000 men has been marshalled here, but it was an invasion of
the arts of peace, creative and not destructive. Possibly the
inhabitants would have liked their occupation to go on for ever; but
even the best of times must have an end, and it was a good
occasion for a holiday. In every Nile village flags and bunting were
flying. For once the fields were deserted, and everywhere the people
crowded to the bank in the hope of catching a glimpse of the
Khedive and his distinguished guests. Here and there the gaffirs, or
local policemen, lined the shore, standing stiffly to attention, or
saluting with their Remingtons in the regulation attitude of European
soldiers, which contrasted quaintly with their loose, flowing robes
and white turbans.
At Assouan the faithful subjects of the Khedive surpassed
themselves. Sunny Assouan lends itself readily to a festal garb.
Situated where the Nile broadens out after emerging from the rocky
defile of the cataract, the town has a most picturesque aspect at all
times; its embanked river-front makes it the neatest of all the cities of
Upper Egypt. Elephantine and the Sirdar’s Island rise green and
smiling out of the broad bosom of the river; the perpetual blue sky
makes everything doubly attractive to the Northern visitor. Dressed
for the festival, it was a charming scene. Triumphal arches of the
sacred yellow and brown, gorgeous hangings and many-coloured
festoons, bore testimony to the Oriental love of vivid hues; steamers
and dahabiehs, moored in line along the shore as well as along
Elephantine Island, vied with each other in their decorations, and
numerous feluccas were plying to and fro, half hidden by their
burdens of flags and palm-leaves. At night thousands of lamps
decorated shore and river alike, and the whole scene resembled
nothing so much as a Henley in Regatta Week, with its illuminations
unrestrained by doubts of weather. To the ear, however, the voices of
the night told a very different tale. The crooning song of the Nubian
boatmen, ‘Great is the Prophet, praise be to him!’ accompanying the
creaking of their clumsy oars with monotonous persistency, sounded
weird and barbaric over the twinkling waters. The bustle in the town,
too, was no mere ordinary festal murmur; for this was the month of
Ramadan, and the feast of lamps meant a great deal to all faithful
Moslems. All day long they have abstained from food or drink, and
the going down of the sun is keenly welcomed as the end of one day
more of fasting.
The secret of the prosperity of Assouan lies in its granite. It is the
granite bed of the river at this point that makes the Reservoir
possible; here are the granite quarries from which the Dam was built,
and from which every ruler of Egypt who wished to raise a
monument for all time has drawn his supplies. Nothing that I have
seen in this country brings the past so near as these quarries. Here
lies a rough-hewn obelisk, just ready to be rolled away; here an
enormous block of stone half hollowed into a bath for an Emperor, or
a sarcophagus for an Apis bull, designed by some mighty ruler who
‘thought in continents,’ and recked little of the lives and labours of
thousands provided he gratified his whim. But suddenly death or
some other fate intervened, and a feebler or more merciful
generation has never taken up the work. You may see the marks of
the wedges on some great face of rock, as fresh as if it was only
yesterday that Pharaoh’s workmen had driven them in and poured
water on the wood till it swelled and burst the stone; down below is
the fallen piece still waiting for the mason who never came back to it.
Perhaps some of the very stones cut by Cheops or Rameses have
been smoothed and planed and set in the Great Dam.
Passing along the raised causeway, down which so many great
monuments have been rolled slowly to the river, I came through a
long stretch of burning desert to a spur on the northern extremity of
the granite hills. Here, unexpectedly, I found myself overlooking the
lake formed by the filling of the Reservoir. Graceful lines of palm-
trees showed where the banks of the river had once been. Philæ
was but an insignificant speck on the blue waters, overpowered by
the fantastic piles of granite boulders that hem in the valley. In the far
distance rose some lofty hills, crowned by dazzling sand that might
easily have been mistaken for snow. The Dam builders have been
accused of vandalism, but they have created a standing pool in the
wilderness of surpassing beauty. The view of the lake was not the
only attraction of the spot; at my feet lay a colossal statue of Osiris,
destined for some temple, but never moved from the spot where it
was hewn.
Ancient Egypt may well look on with scornful wonder at our pride
in our achievements. The Great Pyramid at Gizeh contains three
times as much solid masonry as the Dam, cut from these same
quarries. Every one of those huge blocks had to be dragged to the
river, and carried down 600 miles, before it was hoisted into its place.
As an achievement of mechanical power the Great Dam cannot
compare with the Great Pyramid; but when at last I climbed a little
hill hard by the river, below the Reservoir itself, and saw the whole
length of the great stone rampart, stretching right across the valley,
the contrast between the world of Pharaoh and our own came strong
upon me.
Pharaoh, to whom time and life were nothing, out of the misery of
the forced labour of his subjects, raised a perfectly useless
monument of his own folly; yet he achieved his object, and made his
tomb one of the wonders of the world. We, with the free labour of
voluntary workers—paid, fed, and cared for, instead of being driven
by the whip—have dared to harness Nile himself. It is a work vital to
the interests of millions of dwellers by the river. Yet who can say that
the fame of the Pyramid will not endure the longer? Hundreds of
years after the time of Cheops a mighty Dam was built in Southern
Arabia for a like purpose of irrigation; it lasted for eight centuries or
more, and its bursting in 100 A.D. is mentioned in the Koran. Its ruins
remain to this day, and show that it was larger than the Nile Dam.
Eight hundred years is a long life for a reservoir, but if this one lasts
a quarter of that period it will have repaid its cost many hundred
times over.
Certainly it looks strong enough to last as long as the Nile itself.
Strength, and nothing but strength, shows in every stone of it.
Square, solid, and massive, it runs from shore to shore in an
absolutely straight line, without the slightest attempt at any trace of
ornament or decoration. Clearly, effect has been the last thing
thought of. Even the sluice-gates have absolutely plain rectangular
openings, and it detracts from the symmetry of the design that,
owing to engineering exigencies, they are not all of one height, but
run in sections of five, some of them lower than others. The top of
the wall runs in a simple, unbroken level; there is nothing to catch
the eye as it travels up the steep face of masonry except the
slightest change in the angle of the slope to a nearly complete
perpendicular. The wall simply leaves off because its builders
thought it high enough for the present. Along the broad surface of
the summit runs a tramway, with plenty of room for a man to walk on
either side, flanked by perfectly plain, solid parapets as high as the
waist, and more than a yard thick, of a piece with the masonry below.
On the eastern side the Dam is unostentatiously built into the
living rocks; no arch or pylon marks its start. On the western side it is
flanked by a ladder of four immense locks, set in a mountainous
embankment. The gallows-like arms of the draw-bridge, hideous in
appearance, but a marvel of mechanical ingenuity, over the upper
gate of the highest lock are the only break in the long, unrelieved
level. The hard gray colour of the granite strengthens the general
impression, though in time every part exposed to the action of the
water will be coated with the shining black varnish which the Nile
mud always lays on granite, and it will look exactly the same as the
natural bed of the stream.
How different all this is from the prettiness of the Delta Barrage,
with its brickwork, originally designed and built under French
influence, adorned with archways and towers, of which the lovely
garden, with its flowers and shrubs, its green lawns and leafy trees,
on the tongue of land which it crosses, seems a natural and
appropriate part! The Assouan Dam is the work of a practical,
unimaginative race. Its builders have had before them the problem of
harnessing the great river with a yoke that cannot be broken; they
had to hold up a reservoir containing 100,000,000 tons of water, so
that for 140 miles the river is turned back upon itself; and they have
succeeded.
In December all but a few of the sluice-gates are shut, for the
reservoir has to be filled. But imagine it at the height of the flood,
when the collected rainfall of half a continent is crashing past at the
rate of nearly 1,000,000 tons a minute, and through each of the 180
openings shoots a solid cube of dark water to dash thundering in
clouds of white foam on the rocks below, and rush tumultuously
down the swirling slopes of the cataract. Think of the huge bulk of
water held up when the reservoir is full. Then you will understand
something of the difficulties of the work. Solidity and strength could
not but be the first and overpowering idea in the minds of the
builders. The longer you look, the more you are impressed. The vast
dimensions of the Dam grow upon you from moment to moment.
There is, after all, a fierce beauty in those uncompromising features,
grimly set in the determination to hold the river in bondage. The
massive structure is in harmony with the forces of Nature. Feeble
and puny it may be compared with even the least of their handiwork,
but it is impossible not to feel that its builders have been inspired
with a spark of the same creative power. They drew their plans, and
dug and built and strove their best to control the great river. They
have succeeded because a portion of that spirit of Nature against
which they struggled has passed into their work.
Is it too much to hope that a scheme of decoration may yet be
found in consonance with these ideas? Some day the Dam will be
raised to the full height of the original design, thus doubling the
present capacity of the Reservoir. Then will be the time to finish the
work magnificently, and make of it a stately monument, to be the
glory of Egypt as well as the foundation of her material prosperity.
The subject is worthy of a great artist. Only a scheme conceived on
grand lines, perfectly simple and bold, can have the least chance of
success. Anything else would be as ridiculous as a proposal to place
a statue of ordinary dimensions on the top of the Great Pyramid. The
difficulties are great, and so would be the expense, so great, indeed,
that it would be far better to avoid any attempt at decoration, unless
the results are to be admirable beyond all question. Are there no
possible successors to the architects of Karnak?
The ceremony of inauguration was, like the masonry of the Dam
itself, sensible and solid, but it was not impressive. Those who
arranged its details had forgotten the vastness of the theatre in
which it was performed. From the purely spectacular point of view it
was a failure. Egypt has no money yet to spend on functions.
Perhaps a better stage management might have made a better
display without any greater expense. The material benefits of English
rule would be appreciated none the less gratefully for a little gilding.
But the Englishman in Egypt has had other things to think about than
the organization of what the native would call ‘fantasias.’ So he fell
back on the established custom of his own country. Wherever he
goes he carries with him law and order and equity and righteousness
and commonsense, and he also carries a peculiar kind of public
ceremonial routine. Everybody knows it. The invited guests arrive in
special trains, and perspire in top-hats and frock-coats for an
interminable time, until Royalty arrives full of gracious smiles amid a
cheering crowd. The distinguished persons pass into a pen carpeted
with red baize, where all the notables are assembled. Somebody
makes a perfectly inaudible speech, which receives a gracious and
inaudible reply. A button is pressed here, a lever turned there, and
several extraordinary things begin to happen in consequence. Then
a number of good men and true receive some well-earned
decorations, Royalty graciously departs, and everybody presses
home as best he can, while the band plays the National Anthem. The
whole is accompanied by the clicking of innumerable cameras, and

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Strategic Management and

Organisational Dynamics 7th Edition

We combine innovative learning technology with trusted content

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Ralph D. Stacey and Chris Mowles

List of boxes xiii

1 Strategic management in perspective: a step in the professionalisation

Part 1 Systemic ways of thinking about strategy and organisational

3 The origins of systems thinking in the Age of Reason 48

Part 2 The challenge of complexity to ways of thinking

10 The complexity sciences: the sciences of uncertainty 238

Part 3 Complex responsive processes as a way of thinking about

12 Responsive processes thinking: the interplay of intentions 302

List of boxes xiii

1 Strategic management in perspective: a step in the professionalisation

2 Thinking about strategy and organisational change: the implicit

Part 1 Systemic ways of thinking about strategy and

3 The origins of systems thinking in the Age of Reason 48

3.5 Thinking about organisations and their management: science

7 Thinking about strategy process from a systemic perspective:

Part 2 The challenge of complexity to ways

10 The complexity sciences: the sciences of uncertainty 238

10.4 Complex adaptive systems 247

Part 3 Complex responsive processes as a way of thinking

12 Responsive processes thinking: the interplay of intentions 302

14 The link between the local communicative interaction of strategising

18 Complex responsive processes: implications for thinking about

Box 3.1 Key concepts in Kantian thinking 57

Tables A.1 Classification of schools of strategy thinking 46

us some sense of what many expect to find in a textbook on strategic management.

it is to the most powerful ‘tool or technique’ available to managers, indeed to any

1.2 The origins of modern concepts of strategic management: the new

particularly in the USA, which encompassed not simply hierarchies of managers

the presentation of managers as professionals whose purpose was the stewardship of

In a sense, post-war organisational managers were importing systemic practice from

and during this period management consultancy successfully established itself as a

moved into significant decline, accompanied by alarming increases in inflation rates

THE DAM AND THE NEW BARRAGES

This division meant that 52,000 acres could be reclaimed to

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List of boxes xiii

3 The origins of systems thinking in the Age of Reason 48

Part 2 The challenge of complexity to ways of thinking

10 The complexity sciences: the sciences of uncertainty 238

12 Responsive processes thinking: the interplay of intentions 302

List of boxes xiii

3.5 Thinking about organisations and their management: science

10.4 Complex adaptive systems 247

1.2 The origins of modern concepts of strategic management: the new