Customer Reviews
Handcrafting strategy instead of strategic planning
Henry Mintzberg is Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is also Professor of Organization at ISEAD, the famous French business school. I would like to issue a word of warning to people who are not familiar with Henry Mintzberg, he is unlike any other business school professor. He likes to provoke and uses untraditional examples. For instance, in this article he compares the traditional strategic planning process with a single craftsman, a potter (I believe his wife).
"My thesis is simple: The crafting image potter captures the process by which effective strategies come to be. The planning image, long popular in the literature, distorts these processes and thereby misguides organizations that embrace it unreservedly." Initially, he explains the reasons why the strategic planning is ineffective. Then, he explains why strategies do not need to be deliberate and can emerge or shape. Mintzberg expands on the emergence of effective strategies. He introduces personal strategy (deliberate for one person but not for the organization), consensus strategy (follows trends), umbrella strategy (based on broad guidelines), and process strategy (strategy formation that leaves the actual content to others). Although most literature claims that change must continuous, research from McGill University shows that the opposite is true: "a strategic revolution must take place." Mintzberg concludes that managing strategy is "to craft thought and action, control and learning, stability and change." He discusses his viewpoint in detail with some great insights and examples: "Like potters at the wheel, organizations must make sense of the past if they hope to manage the future. ... Thus crafting strategy, like managing craft, requires a natural synthesis of the future, present, and past."
Yes, this article is very interesting. Amazingly enough this article was published in the same issue of the Harvard Business Review (July-August 1987) as Michael Porter's 'From Competitive Advantage to Corporate Strategy'. Both have almost completely opposite views on strategy and both won the McKinsey Award, but Mintzberg's writing style makes it possible to see them as complements to each other. The article is not that simple to read as it is pretty deep, but it provides great insights in the faults of traditional strategic planning (or budget process).
