This is the kind of book that everyone who wants to be a business administrator should read. It is a compilation of diferents articles most of them from HBR and each unit has some real cases which explain the theme better.

I managed to read it throughly and study most of the cases presented on this book. This book is a very actual source of information to learn and expand existing knowledge. I give 5-stars due to the fact that it is rich in its contents.

As frightening as the volume of the book might see, it is written very well and it is very contemporary with the topics discussed in.
The book is divided in several sections with general theory and implications disussed first and with some real cases presented afterwards. Each case is usually backed with some questions to think about and to extract the essence of it. The complete book feels like being a student in the class with authors performing as teachers (as they also do sometimes).
Concepts of strategy are extremely tricky. It can hardly been negotiated if there is a strategy or if you just got to have the feeling or if there simply are people who earn 1 million US$+ a year that turn into gold everything they touch and you can't run a serious business without them. This book will help you understand that strategy exists, will teach you how to define it and set it through and how to predict the future and react on it. But as real life is, many things can happen. You get the driver's licence after you learn the basics of driving. But no one can tell after you get the licence if you will get involved into the crash and when.
Many people expect from such books that they will get a broad pavement covered with roses to walk through their careers on simply by paying some 70 US$. How naive they sound sometimes. The pen alone doesn't write a book, it is just an instrument to success, behind which stands an enormous human effort. This wonderful book is only an instrument to avoid some crashes of company in your career. If it can therefore win you a job or a mere 100 US$ raise, it has paid back heavily, don't you think?

This is an important and recent strategy book. I recommend it for MBA students and managers.

James Brian Quinn is Professor of Management, Emeritus; Philip Anderson is an Associate Professor of Business Administration; and Sydney Finkelstein is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Amos Tuck School of Business. This Harvard Business Review article was published in March-April 1996.

In the modern knowledge-economy, the capacity to manage human intellect - and to convert it into a useful products and services - is essential. But according to the authors little attention has been given to managing professional intellect. So what is professional intellect? The professional intellect of an organization operates on four levels: cognitive knowledge (know-what); advanced skills (know-how); systems understanding (know-why); and self-motivated creativity (care-why). Intellect resies in the brains of professionals, but the authors argue that the first three levels can also exist in the organization's systems, databases, or operating technologies. The authors then continue to describe how to develop and leverage professional intellect, whereby they mostly use management consulting firms as examples. They then turn to the change from traditional hierarchical organizations to invert organizations (where field experts are control), and spider's webs (where specialists team up to solve specific challenges). The type of forms used within each organization depends on the type of purpose, where each form requires specific cultural norms supported by software and tailored performance-measurement and reward systems.

This article discusses an important issue in the modern knowledge economy. They introduce an useful definition of professional intellect, but I believe that the solutions for developing and leveraging this intellect are somewhat too simple. I also believe that the authors put too much emphasis on the use of information systems, which sounds too much like a salesprogram from management consulting firms. Still, an interesting article. The authors use business US-English.

Mintzberg is a brilliant strategist, and due to the extensive knowledge, it is hard at times to get to point of the concept. In some cases, the information is provided in almost elementary style, which is not bad, but most of the writings are very hard to digest. I did learn a great deal from this book, but I admit, I will have to reengage it again to get the full benefit.

Don't expect a textbook on how to develop strategy (although, expect a similar result). Well thought-out and structured set of readings that provide insight into the process of developing strategy, from SWOT and Rumelt analysis (Conistency, Consonance, Feasibility, Advantage) through organizational structure and Entrepeneurship.

However, I found the readings extremely hard work to read. It may be inexperience, but (especially in the early chapters), the readings simply take a LONG time to do (and I'm not a slow reader). A nice addition might be a more comprehensive summary of the readings at the start or end of each chapter.

Overall, I go with a 3-star, mainly because of the reading difficulty more than the actual content.

Great book and "great" price