Extensive summary written by a honours student of the book Strategy Safari: a guided tour through the wilds of strategic management. The last 6 pages contain an overview of the ten schools.
Samenvatting Organisation and Environment - Strategy Safari by Mintzberg et al.
College-aantekeningen Organization & Environment alle 10 'schools'
Oefententamen Organisation & Environment
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,Chapter 1: Strategic management beast 2
Chapter 2: The design school. Strategy formation as a process of conception. 3
Chapter 3: The planning school. Strategy formation as a formal process 6
Chapter 4: The positioning school. Strategy formation as an analytical process. 11
Chapter 5: The entrepreneurial school. Strategy formation as a visionary process. 17
Chapter 6: The cognitive school. Strategy formation as a mental process. 21
Chapter 7: The learning school. Strategy formation as an emergent process. 24
Chapter 8: The power school. Strategy formation as a process of negotiation. 31
Chapter 9: The cultural school. Strategy formation as a collective process. 34
Chapter 10: The environmental school: strategy formation as a reactive process 38
Chapter 11: The configuration school. Strategy formation as a process of transformation.41
Chapter 12: You have to meet the whole beast 49
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,Chapter 1: Strategic management beast
Prescriptive: more concerned with how strategies should be formulated than with how they
necessarily do form.
Descriptive: describing how strategies do get made.
Category School Strategy formation as a(n)
Prescriptive schools Design school Process of conception
Planning school Formal process
Positioning school Analytical process
Descriptive schools Entrepreneurial school Visionary process
Cognitive school Mental process
Learning school Emergent process
Power school Process of negotiation
Cultural school Collective process
Environmental school Reactive process
Configuration school Process of transformation
The configuration school combines the others. Seeking to be integrative, cluster the various elements
of the best – the strategy – making process, the content of strategies, the structure of the
organization and its context.
Strategy: top management’s plan to attain outcomes consistent with the organization’s missions and
goals.
Strategy requires a number of definitions:
Strategies as plans (intended) and patterns (realized).
As a plan: looking ahead. As a pattern: looking at past behaviour.
Strategies as deliberate and emergent.
Deliberate strategy: intentions that are fully realized.
Unrealized strategy: intentions that are not realized.
Emergent strategy: where a patterns is realized that was not expressly intended. Actions were
taken, one by one, which converged over time to some sort of consistency, pattern.
Strategies as portions and perspective.
Position: the locating of particular products in particular markets
Perspective: an organization’s fundamental way of doing things.
Strategy as a ploy
A specific manoeuvre intended to outwit an opponent or competitor. Here the real strategy
(as plan, the real intention) is the threat, not the expansion itself.
Four basic approaches to strategy
Strategic planning. Planning, design, and positioning school
Strategic visioning. Entrepreneurial, design, cultural and cognitive school
Strategic venturing. Learning, power and cognitive school
Strategic learning. Learning and entrepreneurial school.
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,Chapter 2: The design school. Strategy formation as a process
of conception.
The design school is most influential of the ten schools. It seeks to attain a match, or fit, between
internal capabilities and external possibilities.
Origins of design school
Selznick and Chandler
Distinctive competence: the need to bring together the organization’s internal state with its extneral
expectations.
Basic design of the model
SWOT: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities,
threats. Appraisal of the internal and external
situation.
See the model on the right.
External appraisal: technologic, economic, social
and political aspects (PESTEL).
Internal appraisal: hard to know yourself.
Individual and unsupported flashed of strength are
not as dependable as the gradually accumulated
product-and-market-related fruits of experience.
Commitments to ways of acting and responding
are built into the organization.
Managerial values: the beliefs and preferences of
those who formally lead the organization.
Social responsibility: the ethics of the society in
which the organization functions.
Generation of strategies is a creative act. Not a linear process, but an iterative process.
Evaluation and choice of strategy: series of tests by Ramelt
Consistency
The strategy must not present mutually inconsistent goals and policies.
Consonance
The strategy must represent an adaptive response to the external environment and to the
critical changes occurring within it.
Advantage
The strategy must provide for the creation and/or maintenance of a competitive advantage
in the selected area of activity
Feasibility
The strategy must neither overtax available resources nor create unsolvable sub problems
Once a strategy has been agreed upon, it is then implemented.
Keep strategies clear, simple and specific.
This school has not developed so much as to provide the basis for developments in other schools.
Adding the formality of the planning school, the analyses of the positioning school, the adaptability
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,of the learning school. People took some of the ideas of the design school and elaborated them in
terms of other assumptions about the strategy process.
Premises of the design school
1. Strategy formation should be a deliberate process of conscious thought. Action must flow
from reason: effective strategies derive form a tightly controlled process of human thinking.
Strategy making must be learned formally, it is an acquired skill.
2. Responsibility for that control and consciousness must rest with the chief executive officer:
that person is the strategist. Only one strategist, the highest person in the hierarchy. This
premise does not only relegates other members of the organization to subordinate roles in
strategy formation, but also precludes external actors. Thus the environment should be
accounted for, navigated through, but further it is banned, not interacted with.
3. The model of strategy formation must be kept simple and informal. Elaboration and
formalization will sap the model of its essence.
4. Strategies should be one of a kind: the best ones result from a process of individualized
design. It is the specific situation that matters, not any system of general variables. Strategies
have to be tailored to the individual case. The design school says little about the content of
strategies themselves, but instead concentrates on the process by which they should be
developed. should be a creative act to build on distinctive competence
5. The design process is complete when strategy appears fully formulated, as perspective.
Little room for emergent or incremental strategies. Not the Darwinian view, but rather the
Biblical version.
6. These strategies should be explicit, so they have to be kept simple. Explicit for those who
make them. Articulated, so that other can understand them.
7. Only after these unique, full-blown, explicit, and simple strategies are fully formulated can
they then be implemented. Sharp distinction between formulation and implementation.
Separates thinking from acting. Structure must follow strategy.
Critique of the design school
It denies important aspects of strategy formation; incremental development, emergent strategy, full
participation of actors. how do they narrow the perspectives of the design school to particular
contexts.
Assessment of strengths and weaknesses; bypassing learning
Rather a process of conception than one of learning. Can any organization be really sure of
its strengths before tests them? Might they not also be distinct to context, time, even to
application?
Every strategic change involves some kind of risk. No organization can ever be sure in
advance whether an established competence will prove to be strength or weakness.
Structure follows strategy… as the left foot follows the right
The past counts, you cannot just change the course. The established capabilities of the
organization are embedded in its structure. The development of strategy and the design of
structure both support the organization, as well as each other. Strategy formation is an
integrated system.
Making strategy explicit: promoting inflexibility
Organizations cope with uncertainty. How can a company come to grips with a changing
environment when its strategy is already known? Organizations must function, not only with
strategy, but also during periods of formation of strategy. The danger is not the lack of
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, explicit strategy, but premature closure. They can also impede strategic change when it does
become necessary. Strategies cannot be sure forever. Creates a resistance to later change.
Separation of formulation from implementation: detaching thinking from acting
Assumption here is that environments can be understood. However, this is not the case. In
an unstable environment, the distinction collapses. The formulator has to be the
implementor or vice versa. Thinking and action have to proceed in tandem. As the
implementors formulate, the organization learns.
Intended strategies exist, but realized strategies also emerge.
The design school has focused on the process, not the product.
The design school: contexts and contributions
The design school offers universality, but there is no best one way to strategy.
Four conditions that should encourage an organization to tilt toward the design school model:
I. One brain van, in principle, handle all the information relevant for strategy formation.
II. That brain is able to have full, detailed, intimate knowledge of the situation in question.
III. The relevant knowledge must be established before a new intended strategy has to be
implemented – in other words, the situation has to remain relatively stable or at least
predictable.
IV. The organization in question must be prepared to cope with a centrally articulated strategy.
The design school model would seem to apply best at the junction of a major shift for an
organization, coming ou t of a period of changing circumstances and into one of operating stability.
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