Strategy Safari: Your Complete Guide Through the Wilds of Strategic Management (2nd Edition)
Samenvatting:
Strategy Safari: Your Complete
Guide Through the Wilds of
Strategic Management
Second Edition
Mintzberg, Ahlstrand & Lampel
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,Strategy Safari: Your Complete Guide Through the Wilds of Strategic Management (2nd Edition)
Inhoudsopgave
Chapter 1 - ‘And over here, ladies and gentlemen: the strategic management beast’ ...................... 3
Chapter 2 - ‘The design school: strategy formation as a process of conception’ ............................... 5
Chapter 3 – ‘The planning school: strategy formation as a formal process’ ..................................... 10
Chapter 4 – ‘The positioning school: strategy formation as an analytical process’ .......................... 17
Chapter 5 – ‘The entrepreneurial school: strategy formation as a visionary process’ .................... 27
Chapter 6 - ‘The cognitive school: strategy formation as a mental process’ .................................... 33
Chapter 7 – ‘The learning school: strategy formation as an emergent process’ .............................. 39
Chapter 8 – ‘The power school: strategy formation as a process of negotiation’ ............................ 49
Chapter 9 – ‘The cultural school: strategy formation as a collective process’ .................................. 58
Chapter 10 – ‘The environmental school: strategy formation as a reactive process’ ....................... 64
Chapter 11 – ‘The configuration school: strategy formation as a process of transformation’ .......... 68
Chapter 12 – ‘Hang on, ladies and gentlemen, you have yet to meet the whole beast’ ................. 78
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,Strategy Safari: Your Complete Guide Through the Wilds of Strategic Management (2nd Edition)
Chapter 1 - ‘And over here, ladies and gentlemen: the strategic management beast’
‘The blind men and the elephant’
Wall, spear, snake, tree, fan and rope.
We are the blind people and strategy information is our elephant. We must not simply add up the parts, but
also need to understand the parts. The next ten chapters describe 10 parts of our strategy-formation beast.
Each represents one ‘school of thought’.
Why ten?
Each school has a unique perspective that focuses on one major aspect of the strategy-information process.
The handicap of blindness does have an unexpected advantage, sharpening the other senses to the
subtleties that can escape those who see clearly.
The schools
Prescriptive in nature – more concerned with how strategies should be formulated than with how they
necessarily do form:
- The Design School: Strategy formation as a process of conception.
Focuses on strategy formation as a process of informal design, essentially one of conception.
Presented the basic framework on which the following two were built in the 1960s
- The Planning School: Strategy formation as a formal process.
Formalized that perspective, seeing strategy making as a more detached and systematic
process of formal planning.
Developed in parallel in the 1960s and was in practice in the 1970s.
- The Positioning School: Strategy formation as an analytical process.
Less concerned with the process of strategy formation than with the actual content of strategies.
Focuses on the selection of strategic positions in the economic marketplace.
Came in the 1980s.
The next schools consider specific aspects of the process of strategy formation. They have been concerned
less with prescribing ideal strategic behaviour than with describing how strategies do get made.
- The Entrepreneurial School: Strategy formation as a visionary process.
Describes the process in terms of the creation of vision by the great leader.
- The Cognitive School: Strategy formation as a mental process.
Seeks to use the messages of cognitive psychology to enter the strategist’s mind.
- The Learning School: Strategy formation an emergent process.
The world is too complex to allow strategies to be developed all at once as clear plans or
visions. Strategies must emerge in small steps, as an organization adapts, or ‘learns’.
- The Power School: Strategy formation as a process of negotiation.
Treats strategy formation as a process of negotiation, whether by conflicting groups within an
organization or by organizations themselves as they confront their external environments.
- The Cultural School: Strategy formation as a collective process.
The process is viewed as fundamentally collective and cooperative.
- The Environmental School: Strategy formation as a reactive process.
Organization theorists who believe strategy formation is a reactive process in which the initiative
lies not inside the organization, but with its external context. These people seek to understand
the pressures imposed on organizations.
- The Configuration School: Strategy formation as a process of transformation.
This school really combines the others. People in this school, in seeking to be integrative,
cluster the various elements of our beast into distinct stages or episodes. Another side of this
school describes the process as one of transformation, which resembles ‘strategic change’.
A field review
The authors do not seek to review the literature. This book is a field review, not a literature review. They seek
to cover the literature and the practice – to set out its different angles, orientations, tendencies, etc.
Ignorance of an organization’s past can undermine the development of strategies for its future. The same is
true for the field of strategic management. In this book the authors will ignore past work at their own peril.
Five Ps for strategy
The word strategy is very influential, but what does it really mean? Most definitions say: ‘top management’s
plans to attain outcomes consistent with the organization’s missions and goals’. The authors argue that
strategy requires a number of definitions, five in particular.
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,Strategy Safari: Your Complete Guide Through the Wilds of Strategic Management (2nd Edition)
Strategies as plans and patterns
- Strategy is a plan, or something equivalent – a direction, a guide or course of action into the future, a
path to get from here to there. Strategy as a plan means looking ahead.
- Strategy is also a pattern, a consistency in behaviour over time. Strategy as a pattern means looking
at past behaviour.
Both definitions appear to be valid: organizations develop plans for their future and they also evolve patterns
out of their past. We can call one intended strategy and the other realized strategy. Must realized strategies
always have been intended? Most people would say that they did not stray completely from their intentions,
but neither did they achieve them perfectly. Perfect realization implies brilliant foresight, not the mention an
unwillingness to adapt to unexpected events, while no realization at all suggests a certain mindlessness. The
real world inevitably involves some thinking ahead as well as some adaptation en route.
Strategies as deliberate and emergent
- Deliberate strategies: Intentions that are fully realized.
- Unrealized strategies: Those that are not realized at
all.
- Emergent strategy: Where a pattern is realized that
was not expressly intended. Actions were taken, one
by one, which converged over time to some sort of
consistency, or pattern.
A few, if any, strategies are purely deliberate (no learning), just
as few are purely emergent (no control). All real-world
strategies need to mix these in some way to exercise control
while fostering learning: strategies have to form as well as be
formulated.
- Umbrella strategy: The broad outlines are deliberate,
while the details are allowed to emerge en route.
Emergent strategies are not necessarily bad and deliberate
strategies good.
Strategies as positions and perspective
- To some people, strategy is a position, namely the locating of particular products in particular
markets. As position, strategy looks down – to the ‘x’ that marks the spot where the product meets
the customer, as well as out – to the external marketplace.
- To others, strategy is a perspective, namely an organization’s fundamental way of doing things. As
perspective, strategy looks in – inside the organization, indeed, inside the heads of the strategists,
but it also looks up – to the grand vision of the enterprise.
Changing position within perspective may be easy, but changing perspective, even while trying to maintain
position, is not.
All the Ps
A fifth definition of strategy is that strategy is a ploy, a specific ‘manoeuvre’ intended to outwit an opponent or
competitor. The real strategy is the threat.
Five definitions and ten schools. The relationships between them are varied, but some of the schools have
their preferences:
- The Planning School: plan.
- The Positioning School: position.
- The Entrepreneurial School: perspective.
- The Learning School: pattern.
- The Power School: ploy.
Combining plan and pattern with position and perspective, we can derive four basic approaches to strategy
formation, which correspond to some of the schools:
- Strategic planning: planning, design and positioning schools.
- Strategic visioning: entrepreneurial, design, cultural and cognitive schools.
- Strategic venturing: learning, power and cognitive schools.
- Strategic learning: learning and entrepreneurial schools.
Strategic Process to:
Strategy Content as: Deliberate Plans Emergent Patterns
Tangible Positions Strategic Planning Strategic Venturing
Broad Perspective Strategic Visioning Strategic Learning
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, Strategy Safari: Your Complete Guide Through the Wilds of Strategic Management (2nd Edition)
Strategies for better and for worse
For every advantage associated with strategy, there is an associated drawback or disadvantage:
1. ‘Strategy sets direction.’
Advantage: The main role of strategy is to chart the course of an organization in order for it
to sail cohesively through its environment.
Disadvantage: Strategic direction can also serve as a set of blinders to hide potential
dangers. Setting out on a predetermined course in unknown waters is the perfect way to sail
into an iceberg. It is also important to look sideways.
2. ‘Strategy focuses effort.’
Advantage: Strategy promotes coordination of activity. Without strategy to focus effort, chaos
can ensue as people pull in a variety of different directions.
Disadvantage: ‘Groupthink’ arises when effort is too carefully focused. There may be no
peripheral vision, to open other possibilities.
3. ‘Strategy defines the organization.’
Advantage: Strategy provides people with a shorthand way to understand their organization
and to distinguish it from others.
Disadvantage: To define an organization too sharply may also mean to define it too simply,
sometimes to the point of stereotyping, so that the rich complexity of the system is lost.
4. ‘Strategy provides consistency.’
Advantage: Strategy is needed to reduce ambiguity and provide order. In this sense, a
strategy is like a theory: a cognitive structure to simplify and explain the world, and thereby
facilitate action.
Disadvantage: Creativity thrives on inconsistency – by finding new combinations of hitherto
separate phenomena.
Every strategy, like every theory, is a simplification that necessarily distorts reality. Strategies and theories
are not reality themselves, only representations (or abstractions) of reality in the minds of people. Ever
strategy can have a misrepresenting or distorting effect: the price of having a strategy.
Strategy resolves the big issues so that people can get on with the little details, but eventually situations
change. Even though the concept of strategy is rooted in stability, so much of the study of strategy focuses
on change. The management of change comes hard. The very encouragement of strategy to get on with it –
its very role in protecting people in the organization from distraction – impedes their capacity to respond to
changes in the environment. Retooling is expensive. Strategy, as mental set, can blind the organization to its
own out datedness. Strategies keep organizations going in a straight line but hardly encourage peripheral
vision. Strategies can be vital to organizations by their absence as well as their presence.
The strategy beast- areas of agreement:
- Strategy concerns both organization and environment.
- The substance of strategy is complex.
- Strategy affects overall welfare of the organization.
- Strategy involves issues of both content and process.
- Strategies are not purely deliberate.
- Strategies exist on different levels.
- Strategy involves various thought processes.
Strategic management in the classroom
High performing firms appear capable of blending competing frames of reference.
The test of a firs-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and
still retain the ability to function. To function as a strategist means not just to hold such opposing views, but
also to be able to synthesize them. But synthesis cannot happen in general. It must ultimately take place in
the specific mind of the beholder.
Chapter 2 - ‘The design school: strategy formation as a process of conception’
The design school represents the most influential view of the strategy-formation process. Its famous notion is
the SWOT – the assessment of Strengths and Weaknesses of an organization in light of the Opportunities
and Threats in its environment.
The design school proposes a model of strategy making that seeks to attain a match, or fit, between internal
capabilities and external possibilities. Economic strategy will be seen as the match between qualifications
and opportunity that positions a firm in its environment. ‘Establish fit’ is the motto of the design school.
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