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Name: Strategy Safari
Rating: 3.8 (62 reviews)
Author: Henry Mintzberg

Henry Mintzberg

A Guided Tour Through the Wilds of Strategic Management

3.8 (62 ratings)

25 mins

What is Strategy Safari about?

Strategy Safari is a comprehensive guidebook to strategy formation, complete with a thorough run-down of all its major schools of thought. By explaining the primary strengths and limitations of each school, Strategy Safari gives you the tools to form the strategy that is right for your business.

Table of Contents

Strategy Safari
summarized in 11 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 11

What’s in it for me? Take a journey through all the approaches to managing strategy.

Everybody has an opinion about strategy. Some think that strategy is unnecessary and that knowing how to react is more important. Some think it’s better to devise a strategy and stick to it, no matter what you face.

Well, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that whatever your view on strategy is, you’re probably right – at least partly. The bad news is that strategy isn’t as simple as having an opinion!

Strategy is pretty complex when you get into it. It has many different aspects, because it’s not just about making plans and following through. Strategy is more abstract than that, it’s about handling stability and change, and can even be about the patterns, perspectives and positions that influence people when they make decisions.

This pack presents a crash course in management strategy, covering all ten of the most influential schools of thought to give you a comprehensive overview of the field.

After reading these blinks, you’ll know

which strategy Sun-Tzu uses in The Art of War;
which strategy is best for start-ups; and
which school of thought combines all the strategies.

The first and oldest management school is the design school.

Some schools of strategic management are well known even beyond management circles. And although many entrepreneurs aren’t familiar with the term “design school,” its concepts have nonetheless been widely incorporated into many fields.

Design school distinguishes itself from other management strategies because it understands strategy as the process of coming up with ideas. It accomplishes this by employing the famous SWOT model: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

When you use the SWOT model, you consider your organization’s strengths and weaknesses to be contextualized by the opportunities and threats within the business environment.

SWOT also takes into consideration things like social responsibility and the values of management, meaning that strategies are tailored to each individual case.

By laying out the essential elements of strategy, the SWOT model offers you a bird’s eye view of your market and your organization. You can easily see where your strengths match up with an opportunity, and make strategies without even leaving the meeting room.

What’s more, by evaluating your strengths, you can develop strategies based on what you already have, without necessarily having to acquire new assets.

Despite all its benefits, the design school also has some major drawbacks. The school can sometimes be too dogmatic; people who have devised SWOT-based strategies often think they’re grand and universal, which can lead them to overlook problems with feasibility when it comes to actually implementing their theoretical strategy.

Moreover, designing a strategy too far in advance or with too much distance from the actual implementation can lead to huge failures. We have only to look at US military strategies during the Vietnam War – formulated on the other side of the world with no appreciation for the conditions on the ground – to see that this is true.

The planning school is great for assessing what you have and for setting goals.

Notice that the design school considers the whole strategy before putting it into practice. It is this property that makes it a prescriptive strategy, i.e., one where the plan defines the actions.

The planning school is another prescriptive school. It aims to divide the SWOT-model into neatly defined steps, from analysis of the situation (and the SWOT) to the actual implementation of the strategy. It is most often seen in urban planning, system theory and socialistic systems.

The last prescriptive school is the positioning school, which views strategy formation as an analytical process.

Most people don’t want to have to choose from a myriad of strategy opportunities, but would instead rather choose between clear decisions. This can be fulfilled by following the positioning school.

For the positioning school, strategy formation is an analytical process. The concepts behind the positioning school are in fact quite old. Historical military thinkers, for example, went to war with the belief that there was a set of defined strategies and analysis processes to follow. Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War is only one of many examples.

The entrepreneurial school relies on the vision of its leaders.

In the previous blinks, we saw how the deliberately planned strategies of the prescriptive schools don’t necessarily guarantee success. But what explains the impressive track records of those companies whose long-term success was guaranteed by a visionary leader, such as Bill Gates of Microsoft?

One type of visionary leadership is found in the entrepreneurial school, which focuses on the personal role of a single leader, rather than on collective work.

The cognitive school focuses on how we actually formulate strategies.

As we saw in the previous blink, the entrepreneurial school describes who formulates the strategy. But it fails to address the way in which a strategy is carried out. The cognitive school is concerned with the how.

In essence, the cognitive school is about thinking. It imagines managers as information workers who have to process data, organize it, store it and so on. So the cognitive school looks at how managers create their mental maps and how they interpret ideas and situations.

The learning school stresses strategy as a process where ideas come from everywhere.

One thing we haven’t touched on yet is changing and molding strategies over time to suit new conditions. Sometimes you can’t just blow up one strategy and start over! The learning school offers a good alternative.

The learning school sees strategy as an emergent process that occurs as people work collectively with one another. In this way, strategy formulation and implementation are intimately linked.

The power school sees strategy formation as a process of negotiation.

So who gets to pick which strategy will be implemented when there are a number of viable options to choose from? Should it be consultants, or maybe executives? It’s not always clear who should decide.

This question is at the heart of the power school, which looks at strategy as the butting of heads between the people who hold power in the organization as well as the organization itself.

The cultural school focuses on the way collective processes lead to strategy.

Like power, culture is always present. However, strategy schools are hesitant to address it. Not the cultural school, however. The cultural school focuses on all those social connections which create culture, in the hope of fostering efficiency and innovation.

The cultural school involves all the different departments within a company, and recognizes their contributions to the overall strategy. It formulates strategy using everyone’s input while adhering to their culture, social behavior, values and preferences.

The environmental school looks at how external issues affect strategy formation.

So far, the schools that we’ve examined have focused on a particular area as a way to formulate strategy, such as culture, planning and managerial vision. The environmental school is different, in that it takes a huge step back to look at the entire situation in which a company is situated.

For the environmental school, external forces are not a factor in strategy formation, they are the factor. The environmental school makes a conscious effort to remove all choice from their strategy. Instead they simply let their environment shape the strategy.

The configuration school combines the best elements of the prescriptive and descriptive schools.

By this point, you’ve probably noticed that these schools seem to position themselves in opposition to other schools. There is one school, however, that aims to combine their strengths: the configuration school.

For the configuration school, strategy formation is a process of transforming the organization from one strategic approach to another, and then transforming the organization itself. The school has two sides: configuration and transformation.

While the schools each have their strengths, none is perfect – you’ll have to mix and match them.

It’s a difficult task to choose from ten different schools, and even more difficult to stick to only one – so maybe it’s better to stay flexible!

Interestingly enough, there are some threads that run through all of these strategic management schools. For example, all the schools deal with control and change.

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About the Author

Henry Mintzberg is an author and scholar of business and management. In addition, he is a professor at McGill University in Montreal and has written several books on management and strategy.

Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel are academics in the field of strategy formation.

Who should read Strategy Safari?

Anyone interested in strategic management and strategy formation
CEOs, MBA students, managers and entrepreneurs
Anyone working as a consultant or teacher in management

Categories with Strategy Safari

Management & Leadership

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