Drier than Strategy Safari, more incisive than the Strategy Formation Process
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Some authors have just one big idea, and peddle it in different forms throughout their careers. Henry Mintzberg has had three big ideas, and lots of small ideas that are bigger than many other people's big ideas. This book unveils the third big idea, which is a general theory of strategy formation.
The big idea for which Mintzberg has been known the longest is the notion of emergent strategy, by contrast with a formalised, predetermined planning process. Mintzberg has never abandoned this idea, although he now has it as one end of a continuum.
Mintzberg's second big idea was the Configuration school of strategy. Simply put, look at the shape of your organisation to understand its likely strategic direction.
As part of the long research programme which led to this book, Mintzberg, with Ahlstrand and Lampel, also came up with a big-little idea, which was to review all the schools of strategy, categorising them into the ten which are found in the pages of Strategy Safari.
This book, Tracking Strategies, is the culmination of that research project. It synthesises the two previous big ideas, alongside the big-little idea, but it presents the ultimate Mintzberg conclusion.
Note that, over the years, Mintzberg has lost interest in 'what is the ideal strategy', which was at the crux of the original planning vs emergent debate. His main focus now is 'what is the process by which strategy is formed'? In coming to this conclusion, he coalesces his configuration approach into four basic types of organisation: entrepreneurial, machine, adhocracy and professional, and coalesces the Strategy Safari 10 schools into four processes, each particularly suited to one of these kinds of organisations: Visioning, Planning, Learning and Venturing.
Tracking Strategies, as its name implies, is 80% the report of the case-studies which over the years have been the Mintzberg programme. A large number of organisations are represented, and the analyses are detailed and supported by much evidence, including a large number of graphs and charts. To some extent, Mintzberg is setting out his complete stall -- all the best evidence he has amassed over many years, with detailed, technical analysis which is as dispassionate as possible.
The final chapter, though, is the place where he introduces the third big idea: this is that human learning is around the triangle of science (evidence analysed), art (intuition and creation), and craft (learning from experience), and that, crucially, strategy takes place along the line of art and craft, and has much less place for science. This is a bold conclusion -- and may explain Mintzberg's decision to include so much of the evidence. By presenting so much of the science and analysis, he is taking away the possible accusation that he is choosing for art and craft out of an inability to do science.
Mintzberg has been reaching towards this conclusion his entire career. His early aversion to the planning school of strategy, and later to the design school with its SWOT diagrams, was not so much an opposition to planned or prescriptive strategy, which he accepts is frequently a component of effective strategy, but rather the mechanical nature by which the Planners and the Designers claimed to be able to churn out a necessary strategy from the initial data.
Ultimately, this is a fairly dry book, although it is written throughout in Mintzberg's charming style. It comes alive in the final chapter -- although the penultimate chapter, where Mintzberg analyses his own journey, is also fascinating. I can't quite bring myself to accept the complete validity of the case-study approach, although I do accept that virtually all academic writing on strategy is based on case-studies. However, Mintzberg's conclusions are fresh, innovative, and, crucially, immediately applicable to the task of being a strategist in the real world.
Recommended.
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