Mintzberg 1987. Crafting Strategy 2022-10-29
Mintzberg 1987
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Henry Mintzberg is a well-known organizational theorist and management researcher. In 1987, he published a paper titled "The Design School: Reconsidering the Basic Premises of Strategic Management." In this paper, Mintzberg challenges the traditional assumptions of strategic management and proposes a new approach called the "design school."
According to Mintzberg, the traditional approach to strategic management, known as the "planning school," is based on the assumption that organizations can be planned and controlled like machines. This approach focuses on creating detailed plans and processes for achieving specific goals. However, Mintzberg argues that this approach is fundamentally flawed because it ignores the complexity and dynamics of real-world organizations.
Mintzberg's design school approach, on the other hand, recognizes that organizations are complex social systems that cannot be fully planned or controlled. Instead, the design school approach focuses on designing organizations that are adaptable and capable of responding to changing circumstances. This approach involves creating a vision for the organization, establishing a set of guiding principles, and building structures and processes that support the organization's goals.
Mintzberg's design school approach has had a significant impact on the field of strategic management and has influenced the way that organizations are designed and managed. His ideas have been widely cited and have contributed to a shift in thinking about how organizations can be more effective.
Overall, Mintzberg's 1987 paper represents an important contribution to the field of organizational theory and has had a lasting impact on the way that organizations are understood and managed. It highlights the limitations of traditional approaches to strategic management and offers an alternative approach that takes into account the complexity and dynamics of real-world organizations.
Mintzberg's 5Ps of Strategy
Planning was not deciding to expand into shopping centers, but explicating to what extent and when, with how many stores, and on what schedule. Effective strategies can show up in the strangest places and develop through the most unexpected means. One is analysis, and the other is synthesis. Schroder and P Suedfeld, eds. Von C1ausewitz, On War translated by M. The Need for Eclecticism in efinition While various relationships exist among the different definitions, no one rela- tionship, nor any single definition for that matter, takes precedence over the others.
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Crafting Strategy
Thus, effective implementation of strategies is important to the success of every entity. Written plans inform financiers, suppliers, government agencies, and others about the intentions of the organization so that these groups can help it achieve its plans. And it explains a good many of the most dramatic failures in business and public policy today. An appropriate image for the planner might be that person left behind in a meeting, together with the chief executive, after everyone else has departed. The second is the stream of work of a successful potter, my wife, who began her craft in 1967. Planners should make their contribution around the strategy-making process rather than inside it. As a first step, we developed chronological lists and graphs of the most important actions taken by each organizationâsuch as store openings and closings, new flight destinations, and new product introductions.
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Mintzberg's 5 Ps for Strategy
We formulate, then we implement. Egg McMuffin is pure McDonald's, not only in prod- uct and package, but also in production and propagation. Eventually the creativity disappears from their work and the world passes them byâmuch as it did Volkswagenwerk until the company was shocked into its strategic revolution. There are criticisms of this model saying there is the danger of going to the opposite extreme which may result in no strategy, lost strategy or wrong strategy. I want the final report to look like a workshop paper. It should have been called strategic programming, distinguished from other useful things that planners can do, and promoted as a process to formalize, when necessary, the consequences of strategies that have already been developed. Likewise, a corporation may threaten to expand plant capacity to discour- age a competitor from building a new plant.
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Mintzberg, H., 1987. The Strategy Concept complianceportal.american.edu
Real strategists get their hands dirty digging for ideas, and real strategies are built from the occasional nuggets they uncover. One, described in the sidebar, is a research project on patterns in strategy formation that has been going on at McGill University under my direction since 1971. He knew he needed to control those shopping centers and that control would require public financing and other major changes. The popular view sees the strategist as a planner or as a visionary, someone sitting on a pedestal dictating brilliant strategies for everyone else to implement. We might call him or her the left-handed planner.
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Mintzberg, 1987
But these events, while critical, are also easy to recognize. Codification means clarifying and expressing the strategies in terms sufficiently clear to render them formally operational, so that their consequences can be worked out in detail. All of the strategic decisions that were made are symbolically strewn about the table. Here, techniques and tools such as the Futures Wheel, Impact Analysis, and Scenario Analysis can help you explore the possible future scenarios in which competition will occur. Manage Patterns Whether in an executive suite in Manhattan or a pottery studio in Montreal, a key to managing strategy is the ability to detect emerging patterns and help them take shape. Today we hear a great deal about unrealized strategies, almost always in concert with the claim that implementation has failed.
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Mintzberg, H. (1987). The Strategy Concept 15 Ps for Strategy. California Management Review, 30, 11
This may sound like a strange definition for a word that has been so bound up with free will strategos in Greek, the art of the army generaP. Expressed at the Strategic Management Society Conference, Paris, October 1982. See Danny Miller and Peter H. And remember that intentions are cheap, at least when compared with realizations. But only one of them has been widely accepted in the planning community: business-unit managers must take full and effective charge of the strategy-making process.
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The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning
So the trick is to manage within a given strategic orientation most of the time yet be able to pick out the occasional discontinuity that really matters. One point must be emphasized. The conventional view of strategic management, especially in the planning literature, claims that change must be continuous: the organization should be adapting all the time. The most obvious reason is for coordination, to ensure that everyone in the organization pulls in the same direction. No organizationânot even the ones commanded by those ancient Greek generalsâknows enough to work everything out in advance, to ignore learning en route. Systems have never been able to reproduce the synthesis created by the genius entrepreneur or even the ordinary competent strategist, and they likely never will.
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Mintzberg, H., 1987. The Strategy Concept I
Thus, he was forced to live in a limbo, shortly existing in a few last pages on the Late Romantics, a few first pages on the early Modernists, and the dark shadow in between. The problem with the hard data that are supposed to inform the senior manager is they can have a decidedly soft underbelly. In more complex organizations, this may mean building flexible structures, hiring creative people, defining broad umbrella strategies, and watching for the patterns that emerge. But even now, few people fully understand the reason: strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Even in the military: For want of a Nail, the Shoe was lost; for want of a Shoe the Horse was lost. A salesperson convinces a different kind of customer to try a product.
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(PDF) Mintzberg 1987 Crafting strategy
Plans are used to build ships. The lesson that has still not been accepted is that managers will never be able to take charge through a formalized process. But that is an assumption, which may prove false. And because their work lacks definition, identity crises are likely to develop, with neither the craftsmen nor their clientele knowing what to make of it. Honda, if you like, de veloped its intentions through its actions, another way of saying that pattern evoked plan.
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