Should managers forget strategy?

Picked up an interesting quote from Henry Mintzberg, published in Strategic Organization. Mintzberg says the most strange and wonderful things (interview by Pablo Martin de Holan, SO!, 2(2): 207-208):

"Managers should forget the word strategy. They should use their imagination
instead. I believe that strategy is simply putting things together in one’s head, making sense of things in a meaningful way. When we reify strategy it suddenly becomes this Big Thing, and strategy is a sense of where you are going, what direction you and your organization are taking. Strategy in a sense is to move an organization forward, it is not this mysterious thing removed from practice. Michael Porter, but he is not the only one, tends to reify the notion of strategy. But you can do all the analysis you want; life remains rich and complicated. That is what strategy has to be about – not the neat abstractions of the executive suite, but the messy patterns of daily life and how to make sense of them. So as long as managers stay up there disconnected from the reality of their organizations, they can shout down all the strategies they like; they will never work."

So, 'reifying' strategy is what makes it so dangerous, giving it existence beyond what people do. Sounds good to me.