Jul 18th 2008
From Economist.com
Igor Ansoff (1918-2002) was the father of modern strategic thinking. When Gary Hamel referred to the origins of corporate strategy he paid Ansoff an indirect compliment: “Strategy didn’t start with Igor Ansoff, neither did it start with Machiavelli,” he wrote. “It probably did not even start with Sun Tzu. Strategy is as old as human conflict.” In other words, Ansoff came of a great line passing through Machiavelli and Sun Tzu.
Born in Vladivostok of a Russian mother and an American diplomat father, Ansoff spent the first 18 years of his life in Russia before moving to New York, where he studied mechanical engineering and physics. In 1950 he joined the Rand Corporation, an influential think-tank of the time, where he worked on strategic problem-solving for NATO, developing theories that he subsequently came to apply to business.
He then worked for Lockheed, an aerospace company, and became a vice-president before moving on in 1963 to become an academic, first at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, then as founding dean of the Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Ansoff’s 1965 book on corporate strategy, the first to concentrate solely on the subject, was described by Henry Mintzberg, a consistent critic of Ansoff, as “the most elaborate model of strategic planning in the literature”. Although it started with a simple aim, “to produce a resource-allocation pattern that will offer the best potential for meeting the firm’s objectives”, it soon got too bogged down in detail for many readers. It contained a series of rigorous processes and checklists designed to help managers reach strategic decisions.
Ansoff himself came to recognise that too often it resulted in “paralysis by analysis”, and in his later work he moved away from this rigid approach, seeking to find ways of introducing flexibility into the planning process. At the same time he abandoned his search for big universal management prescriptions, believing that each organisation has to make strategic decisions on its own, dependent on its own unique environment.
Ansoff divided management decision-making into three: strategic; administrative; and operating, a classification that has been adopted by many subsequent writers. Several of his other ideas were picked up by other gurus and made more famous—competitive advantage (by Michael Porter), core competence (by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad) and “sticking to your knitting” (by Tom Peters), for example.
In 1974 he moved to Brussels and worked at the European Institute of Advanced Studies in Management, a time that he described as “the most important phase of my intellectual development”. Out of this experience he wrote “Strategic Management” (1979). In 1983 he returned to the United States to become professor of strategic management at the United States International University. He also set up his own consulting business in San Diego, southern California.
“Corporate Strategy: An Analytic Approach to Business Policy for Growth and Expansion”, McGraw-Hill, 1965
“Strategic Management”, Wiley, 1979; republished 2007