The Rise and Fall of Strategic PlanningIn this definitive and revealing history, Henry Mintzberg, the iconoclastic former president of the Strategic Management Society, unmasks the press that has mesmerized so many organizations since 1965: strategic planning. One of our most brilliant and original management thinkers, Mintzberg concludes that the term is an oxymoron -- that strategy cannot be planned because planning is about analysis and strategy is about synthesis. That is why, he asserts, the process has failed so often and so dramatically. Mintzberg traces the origins and history of strategic planning through its prominence and subsequent fall. He argues that we must reconceive the process by which strategies are created -- by emphasizing informal learning and personal vision -- and the roles that can be played by planners. Mintzberg proposes new and unusual definitions of planning and strategy, and examines in novel and insightful ways the various models of strategic planning and the evidence of why they failed. Reviewing the so-called "pitfalls" of planning, he shows how the process itself can destroy commitment, narrow a company's vision, discourage change, and breed an atmosphere of politics. In a harsh critique of many sacred cows, he describes three basic fallacies of the process -- that discontinuities can be predicted, that strategists can be detached from the operations of the organization, and that the process of strategy-making itself can be formalized. Mintzberg devotes a substantial section to the new role for planning, plans, and planners, not inside the strategy-making process, but in support of it, providing some of its inputs and sometimes programming its outputs as well as encouraging strategic thinking in general. This book is required reading for anyone in an organization who is influenced by the planning or the strategy-making processes. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Models of the Strategic Planning Process | 35 |
Objectives Budgets | 67 |
Evidence on Planning | 91 |
Some Real Pitfalls of Planning | 159 |
Fundamental Fallacies of Strategic Planning | 221 |
The Fallacy of Formalization | 294 |
Planning Plan Planners | 323 |
Finders of Strategy | 361 |
The Planner as Strategist | 391 |
Planners in Context | 397 |
References | 417 |
Index | 445 |
About the Author | 459 |
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Page 223 - ... in doing the particular work to be analyzed. Second. Study the exact series of elementary operations or motions which each of these men uses in doing the work which is being investigated, as well as the implements each man uses. Third. Study with a stop-watch the time required to make each of these elementary movements and then select the quickest way of doing each element of the work. Fourth. Eliminate all false movements, slow movements, and useless movements. Fifth. After doing away with all...
Page 324 - It is my basic theme that the human mind is not adapted to interpreting how social systems behave. Our social systems belong to the class called multiloop nonlinear feedback systems. In the long history of evolution it has not been necessary for man to understand these systems until very recent historical times. Evolutionary processes have not given us the mental skill needed to properly interpret the dynamic behavior of the systems of which...
Page 223 - First. Find, say, 10 or 15 different men (preferably in as many separate establishments and different parts of the country) who are especially skilful in doing the particular work to be analyzed. Second. Study the exact series of elementary operations or motions which each of these men uses in doing the work which is being investigated, as well as the implements each man uses.
Page 344 - The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale, but of planning. And for this planning . . . there is no clear upper limit to the desirable size.
Page 137 - A good deal of the corporate planning I have observed is like a ritual rain dance; it has no effect on the weather that follows, but those who engage in it think it does.
Page 203 - Again, few phenomena are more remarkable, yet few have been less remarked, than the degree in which material civilization, — the progress of mankind in all those contrivances which oil the wheels and promote the comfort of daily life, — has been concentrated into the present century.
Page 240 - sophisticated" observers know, the achievement of this stability — which is the manager's objective — is a never-to-be-attained ideal. He is like a symphony orchestra conductor — endeavoring to maintain a melodious performance in which the contributions of the various instruments are coordinated and sequenced, patterned and paced — while the orchestra members are having various personal difficulties, stage hands are moving music stands, alternating excessive heat and cold...
Page 71 - Once enacted, a budget becomes a precedent; the fact that something has been done once vastly increases the chances that it will be done again.
Page 307 - ... can be explained without postulating mechanisms at subconscious levels that are different from those that are partly conscious and partly verbalized. Much of the iceberg is, indeed, below the surface and inaccessible to verbalization, but its concealed bulk is made of the same kind of ice as the part we can see . . . The secret of problem solving is that there is no secret.