ジャンル: 経済・ビジネス
英語難易度: ★★☆
オススメ度: ★★☆☆☆
うーん、正直言って、良い本なのかイマイチなのかよく分かりませんでした。 というか私にとっては、目滑り本、つまり文章を目で追いかけただけの本であり、個別のエピソードには興味を引く部分もありましたが、全体のまとまりとしてはあまり印象が残らなかったという感想です。 世にあまたある戦略本を攻略すべく、サファリに繰り出すハンターのように、たくさんの野獣(戦略論)を捕まえて、それそれ分類して檻に入れてネームプレートをつける、という構成です。 一つ一つの戦略論を丁寧に読み解いた上で、この本を読んでいれば、また違った感想になっていたのかもしれませんが…
(1999年発刊)
メモポイント
(本書では様々な戦力論を10のカテゴリーに分けて説明しています。 印象に残った引用が多く紹介されていたので、一部抜粋しました)
- 机上の学習にてケーススタディをそのまま適用してプランニング、後は実働部隊に実行させる、これは非常に危険な行為。 「ベスト・アンド・ブライテスト」(280冊目)にも登場したベトナム戦争時の米国国防長官のマクナマラが陥った超有名な大失敗。
But how can a student who has read a short résumé of a company but has never seen the products, never met the customers, never visited the factories, possibly know these things? Is this the kind of data necessary to ask the 'critical questions'?
The case study method may be a powerful device to bring a wide variety of experience into the classroom for descriptive purposes. But it can become dangerous when used for prescription: to teach a process by which strategies should be made. If case study teaching has left managers with the impression that, to make strategy, they can remain in their offices surrounded by documents and think—formulate so that others can implement—then it may well have done them and their organizations a great disservice sometimes encouraging strategies that violate the very distinctive competences of their organizations.
Here is how Robert McNamara, one of Harvard's most famous MBAs, spelled out his approach to military strategy as Secretary of Defense: 'We must first determine what our foreign policy is to be, formulate a military strategy to carry out that policy, then build the military forces to successfully conduct this strategy'. He did just this in Vietnam, obsessed with the 'formal and the analytic' as his means of 'selecting and ordering data,' and the results were devastating. It was in the rice paddies of Vietnam that the failures of such an approach became all too apparent.
- 「競争の戦略」(226冊目)のマイケル・ポーター曰く「日本企業には戦略がほとんどない。彼らは戦略を学ぶべきだ」 これに対し著者は反論する。 「まったく分かっていない。ポーターこそ、日本企業から戦略を学ぶべきだ」と。
Indeed, Porter's narrow view of the strategy process led him to an astonishing conclusion, namely that Japanese companies 'rarely have strategies,' that they 'will have to learn strategy' . Were this true, and given the performance of so many Japanese companies, not least Toyota's astounding success at this juncture, how could strategy be a necessary condition for corporate success?! In our opinion, however, it is not true at all. Rather than having to learn strategy, the Japanese might better teach Michael Porter about strategic learning.
Porter argued strongly throughout this article for distinctiveness of strategy and for 'creativity and insight' in 'finding' strategic position; he railed against the benchmarking, herding, and imitating he saw as so common in corporations. This was a welcome commentary. But the question must be raised as to how many of these practices have been encouraged by the very procedures Porter so long advocated.
- ウォーレン・ベニス曰く、「もしあなたに確かなビジョンがあるのなら、決してそれを忘れることは無いはずだ。 ありきたりの声明文のように『ザ・ビジョン』などと銘打って、書き留めておく必要などないはず。 これをやってる企業は、結局、私たちビジョンを覚えてませーん、と言ってるようなもの」
Warren Bennis perhaps put it best with the comment that 'if it is really a vision, you'll never forget it.' In other words, you don't have to write it down. Wouldn't this make a wonderful test for all those banal statements labelled 'the vision'!
- これも面白いエピソード。 ハンガリー陸軍がアルプスで行った軍事演習の際に、雪嵐により道に迷い遭難した話。 彼らは2日間帰還せず三日目にやっと本部隊に戻ることができた。 絶望の中で彼らを支えたのは、ある隊員が待っていた地図だった。これにより彼らは冷静になり、キャンプを張って嵐が過ぎるのを待ち、どうにか地図を頼りに帰還することができた。 そして彼らを迎え入れた部隊の中尉は、その「幸運の地図」を見て驚く。なぜなら、それはアルプスではなくピレネー山脈の地図だったから。 勘違いであったとしても頼るべき物があるということは、人に勇気を与えて行動を促す可能性がある。
Karl Weick likes to recount a story about a Hungarian military unit on manoeuvres in the Alps that did not return after two days in a snowstorm. On the third day, the soldiers appeared, and explained: Yes, they said, we considered ourselves lost and waited for the end. And one of us found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down. We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm, and through the map we discovered our bearings. And here we are. The lieutenant [who had dispatched the unit] borrowed this remarkable map and had a good look at it. He discovered to his astonishment that it was not a map of the Alps, but a map of the Pyrenees.
The moral of the story is clear: when you are lost, any map will do! In other words, a wrong mental representation is better than no representation at all, for at least it gives encouragement, and so can stimulate action.
- 結局、著者の言いたかったことは、本作終盤のこれらの言葉に尽きるのではないか。 「一つの理論だけが正しいということはあり得ない。整然とした理論があっても,実践が伴わなければ意味がない。ハイブリッドで考えよう。 大事なのは、それぞれの学派が持つ狭い視点を超えることなのだ」
But is this what is needed in practice? Can anyone really believe that it has to be one to exclusion of the others? We need good practice, not neat theory. The appearance of various hybrids of the schools is thus a welcome sign. It means not only that the field is coming of age, but also that the practice is becoming more sophisticated. The blind men never saw the corpus callosum of the elephant, the tissue that joins the two hemispheres of its brain. Nor did they see the ligaments that connect its different bones. But we are beginning to get a bit of that perspective in strategic management. It is a good thing, that these parts exist too, because without them all elephants would be dead elephants. And without an understanding of equivalent connections in organizations, all strategies risk becoming dead strategies.
(中略)
But, more importantly, we have to get beyond the narrowness of each school:
理論は当然大事なことですが、それはあくまでも青写真に過ぎません。 実践して初めて得られる気づきも多いはず。 現場からのフィードバックを元に調整してブラッシュアップしていく、そんなステップが経営には必要なのでしょう。
「書を捨てないで、町に出よう!」