Mintzberg †the Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning Essay

The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning by Henry Mintzberg When strategical think arrived on the scene in the mid-? 1960s, collective leaders embraced it as the one best way to devise and mechanism strategies that would enhance the competitiveness of each business unit. True to the scientific steering pioneered by Frederick Taylor, this one best way involved separating thinking from doing and creating a new function staffed by specialists strategic planners. Planning systems were expected to convey the best strategies as well as step-? by-? step instructions for arrying forbidden those strategies so that the doers, the managers of businesses, could non fare them wrong.As we now know, preparation has not exactly worked out that way. While certainly not dead, strategic intend has long since fallen from its pedestal. But even now, few people amply understand the reason strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Indeed, strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, ca using managers to confuse real romance with the manipulation of numbers. And this confusion lies at the heart of the issue the most successful strategies are visions, not plans. Strategic planning, as it has een practiced, has really been strategic programming, the critical point and elaboration of strategies, or visions, that al pointy exist. When companies understand the difference between planning and strategic thinking, they can get back to what the strategy-? making litigate should be capturing what the manager learns from all sources (both the soft insights from his or her personal experiences and the experiences of others throughout the make-up and the hard selective information from market research and the like) and then synthesizing that learning into a vision of the direction that the business should pursue.Organizations isenchanted with strategic planning should not get rid of their planners or conclude that there is no need for programming. Rather, organizations sho uld transmogrify the conventional planning job. Planners should make their contribution around the strategy-? making process rather than inside it. They should supply the formal analyses or hard data that strategic thinking requires, as long as they do it to cover the consideration of issues rather than to discover the one right answer. They should act as catalysts who support strategy making by aiding and encouraging managers to think strategically. And, finally, they an be programmers of a strategy, helping to specify the series of concrete steps need to carry out the vision. By redefining the planners job, companies will get laid the difference between planning and strategic thinking. Planning has always been more or less analysisabout breaking down a goal or delimitate of intentions into steps, formalizing those steps so that they can be implemented more or less automatically, and articulating the anticipated consequences or results of each step.I favour a set of analytic al techniques for developing strategy, Michael 1 Porter, probably the most widely read writer on strategy, wrote in he Economist. The label strategic planning has been applied to all kinds of activities, such as going off to an internal retreat in the mountains to talk about strategy. But call that act planning, let conventional planners organize it, and watch how quickly the event becomes hold (mission statements in the morning, assessment of corporate strengths and weaknesses in the afternoon, strategies carefully articulated by 5 p. m. ). Strategic thinking, in contrast, is about synthesis.