Henry Mintzberg’s career as a consultant and management researcher spans decades and has resulted in numerous works that provide critical perspectives on dominant schools of thought in organizational design, strategies, and planning. Although we hosted him as one of our earliest guests to discuss his book Simply Managing, we hadn’t gone back and discussed his original canon of work independently. But because it was so rich and choosing one best work to cover proved difficult, we decided on a divide-and-conquer approach where each of us in the episode read different works while one was the keeper of the whole canon.
The five works we explored follow: (1) “Patterns in Strategy Formation,” 1978 article in Management Science; (2) “An Emerging Strategy in ‘Direct’ Research,” 1979 article in ASQ; (3) “Of strategies, deliberate and emergent,” 1985 article in SMJ; (4) “The design school: Reconsidering the basic premises of strategic management,” 1990 article in SMJ; and (5) the book The rise and fall of strategic planning, published by Prentice Hall in 2000. With the slight exception of the Direct Research article, all the works would converge on the 2000 book in which Mintzberg summarizes his overall concerns and criticisms about the unfulfilled promises of the theories and tools presented for strategic planning up to that time.
The overriding theme is that good strategies and plans were thought to be the way for organizations to move seamlessly into a more promising and prosperous future. Through clearly defined and executable planning methods, full appreciation and understanding of a firm’s past performance, and simple, effective tools for generating plans, managers could properly prioritize and distribute resources and organizational energy toward a desired outcome, one that could be easily described and explained to members and stakeholders alike. That despite the prevalence of such tools and numerous “studies” supposedly touting their benefits, the outcomes were unsatisfactory and the actual functions of plans and strategies were devolving toward merely means of managerial control. Mintzberg rightfully asks why.
What he deduces through his various works and then derives in the 2000 book are that strategic development and planning suffer from three broad fallacies. The first is the fallacy of predetermination, that a strategy based on a forecast of the future can be made into an executable plan without the plan becoming inflexible and thus driving the organization forward despite disruptions and shocks in the environment. This leads to a tendency for plans to become means of managerial control rather than paths to desired futures. The second is the fallacy of detachment in that the planning function is treated as separate from the line function and detached from day-to-day operations. This leads to plans that sound great but wind up being infeasible and too often nonsensical to those who would have to implement it. Third is the fallacy of formalization, or that “innovation can be institutionalized.” The belief that creativity can be harnessed and systematized has little real support, in Mintzberg’s view. Instead, true managerial creativity became squashed by checklists because of the ease of which checklists allow for ready measurement (even if the measures were bogus to begin with).
He does offer certain circumstances where this form of connecting strategies and plans does work, but these occur infrequently, and instead Mintzberg develops a set of general roles that planners and strategists should play in the course of bringing about needed organizational change toward better futures. His approach is less engineered and more iterative, which not all managers or stakeholders may like, but in his view puts the organization on firmer ground.
You may also download the audio files here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Supplement
Read with us:
Mintzberg, H. (1978). Patterns in Strategy Formation. Management Science, 24(9), 934–948. https://doi.org/10.2307/2630633
Mintzberg, H. (1979). An Emerging Strategy of “Direct” Research. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24(4), 582. https://doi.org/10.2307/2392364
Mintzberg, H. (1990). The design school: Reconsidering the basic premises of strategic management. Strategic Management Journal, 11(3), 171–195. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250110302
Mintzberg, H. (2000). The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. Financial Times Prentice Hall. https://books.google.de/books?id=j7sXs_19dm8C
Mintzberg, H., & Waters, J. A. (1985). Of strategies, deliberate and emergent. Strategic Management Journal, 6(3), 257–272. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250060306.
Related episodes from the Talking About Organizations Podcast:
Episode 14. Simply Managing — Henry Mintzberg