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.
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.
posted by Saku Mantere at 11:17 AM
2 Comments:
I was recently coaching a master's student who could have easily gotten a job in management consulting ... and advised him not to do it.
Of course, the job would pay well, but I suggested that he would probably do strategy analysis for 2 to 3 years, get burned out, and then be out on the job market with skills that aren't really valuable in most companies.
I've come to respect people who stay in the jobs -- maybe in one company, maybe in lateral moves across an industry -- and really understand how a business works. It shouldn't be a surprise that every business works differently ... and it's usually for good reasons. Although there are some companies that don't deserve to continue existing, most companies that survive beyond a few years have at least a few smart people working in it.
Running a business day-to-day is different from changing one, though. Strategy as imagination is making an implicit vision real in the world. Reifying it -- particularly as explicitly rendering it as a document -- changes the nature of the idea. This may contribute to the reduction of the probability that that implicit future state ever becoming a reality.
If a company's strategy is not explicit, how do you communicate it? Do we end up with a hodgepodge of subjective views and clashing egos that create goal incongruence when big decisions are due?
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