Flight of the Flamingoes
3.5 MINTZBERG TEN SCHOOLS OF STRATEGY FORMATION
of patterns over time and strategic management in terms of the feedback generating those patterns. However, contrary to this view is a dominant perception of strategy as a path established by managers to go for next few years in order to achieve specified outcomes.
However, in Strategy Safari, Mintzberg, et al., (1998) identified 10 schools of strategy which should be used as a framework to categorize the field of strategic management. These ten schools have been summarized in Chapter 1 and now are discussed in details below.
3.5.3 The Positioning School
In the positioning school, strategy formation is seen as an analytical process. In short, when a strategy is designed the main focus is on the analysis of facts. In its approach, the positioning school places the business within the context of its industry. It looks at how the organization can improve its strategic positioning within that particular industry. It focuses on hard economic facts and is usually useful in early stages of strategy development when data is analysed. But this school has similar limitations to the planning school in that it neglects other elements at play during strategy formation such as power, politics, culture and social elements. Also, it is biased towards large firms and is number-oriented.
3.5.4 The Entrepreneurial School
The entrepreneurial school sees strategy formation as a visionary process. The visionary process takes place within the mind of the leader of the organization. The school puts emphasis on the innate of mental states and process-intuition, judgment, wisdom, experience and insight. In summary, the basis for strategy formation in this school is that the leader of the organization is the architect of organizational strategy and therefore has to envision the strategy. The advantage of the entrepreneurial school is that if the leader of the organization has a sound vision it will enable the organization to sail cohesively through turbulent times. However, sailing a predefined course can blind someone for potential unexpected dangers or developments.
3.5.5 The Cognitive School
In the cognitive school, strategy formation is perceived as a mental process. It approach to strategy formation is to analyse how people perceive patterns and process information. It concentrates on what is happening in the mind of the strategist and how it processes the
information. In other words its basis is more on the psychology of the strategist. However, this approach to strategy formation is not useful to guide collective strategy processes and may not be practical beyond the conceptual stage.
3.5.6 The Learning School
The learning school sees strategy formation as an emergent process. The management pays close attention over time to what does work and what does not work and incorporate lessons learned into the overall plan of action. The underlying purpose for this incremental approach to strategy formulation is that the world is complex to allow strategies to be developed all at once.
Therefore strategies have to emerge in small steps as the organisation adapts and learns along the way.
The advantage of the learning school is that it offers a solution to deal with complexity and unpredictability in strategy formation. More people can learn than just the leader. But the disadvantage may be with the costs associated with learning. Also, this approach may not be useful during crises situations.
3.5.7 The Power School
This school perceives strategy formation as a process of negotiation. The strategy is developed as a process of negotiation between power holders within the organization and/ or between the organization and its external stakeholders. The advantage of this school is that it is participatory, realistic and useful to understand joint-ventures, strategic alliances and to do stakeholder
analysis. But power politics during negotiation process can be divisive in this school and also it is time consuming and can be costly sometimes.
3.5.8 The Cultural School
The cultural school focuses on a collective process in strategy formation. It tries to involve the various groups and departments or business units within the organization. Strategy formation is viewed as a fundamentally collective and cooperative process. The strategy that is developed is a reflection of the corporate culture of the organization. The advantage of the cultural school to strategy formation is its emphasis on the crucial role that social processes, beliefs and values play in decision-making and in strategy formation.
3.5.9 The Environmental School
This school sees strategy formation as a reactive process. Strategy is a response to the
challenges imposed by the external environment. Where other schools see the environment as a factor, the environmental school sees it as an actor. By implication, the school gives a central role to the environment in strategy formation. However, since the dimensions of the
environment are often vague and aggregated, this renders the school less useful for strategy formation.
3.5.10 The Configuration School
In the configuration school, the strategy formation is perceived as a process of transformation.
This process is aimed at transforming the organization from one type of decision-making structure into another. It assumes that strategy and organizational development are closely integrated and should therefore be reconciled. In the configuration school, an organization can be described in terms of some stable configuration of its characteristics which it adopts for a period of time in a particular context. This makes the organization to behave in particular ways that give rise to a particular set of strategies. The periods of stability are interrupted occasionally by the process of transformation. According to this school what is central to strategic
management is to sustain stability or adapt to strategic change. But periodically there is a need for transformation and the way of strategy formation is that it must adapt to its own time and context. Therefore, strategy formation itself has transfigurations.
Through the above ten schools Mintzberg, et al., (1998) have attempted to give an introduction and overview to the entire field of strategic management. They have attempted to provide a general framework for various approaches used to strategy formation. However, there are other possible classifications of the field of strategy formation such as strategy dynamics, resource- based view and competitive view of strategy formation which have been discussed in this Chapter. This shows that the field of strategic enactment is never exhaustive and is dynamic.