The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning is an important book, whose significance goes well beyond its subject. Most leaders, managers, and companies have adopted methods of deciding what to do and how to implement them without considering the fundamental assumptions and experiences with those methods. In essence, this important knowledge work is back where the planning of manual work was before Frederick Taylor. What he says has implications for quality, production planning, capacity expansions, new product design, IT, and many ohter functions, processes and activities.
Before you dismiss this point as being merely of academic interest, consider several of Mintzberg's more telling points: Forecasting is seldom accurate for long; creating intense alignment in the wrong direction can make a company vulnerable to sudden shifts in the market; formal staffs can simply create political games; and thinking that is not linked into the important processes of the company will have limited impact. If those points are right, what does it mean about how work should be performed in your organization?
Having been there and done that as both a strategic planner in the early 1970s and a strategy consultant before that, I recognize the disease as he diagnoses it. In fact, many of the people he quotes and evaluates are people I know. I also saw many of the companies improve themselves by doing less planning.
You can only cover so much in one book, but the potential of strategic work is to improve significant communications, thinking and action in the enterprise. That can help eliminate the significant stalls that delay progress. If Professor Mintzberg decides to do a second edition of this book, I hope he will do more with those subjects.
What has been disappointing to me and others who are familiar with the problems that strategic planning has experienced is the lack of alternatives being proposed. Mintzberg has proposed one, but it is pretty primitive. It just gets rid of some of the wasted motion in strategic planning, without building on success.
One of the few advanced processes that I know of is one that I co-authored in the soon-to-be-published, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise. If you are interested in that subject, take a look at that book's introduction.
I was pleased to see Mintzberg challenge Michael Porter to choose a method for selecting among paths for a business or company. When I first read Porter, I felt he waffled on that point, too. My research and experience strongly suggest that paths that leave you better off regardless of the unexpected changes you could experience work best. To locate those paths can be made systematic, as a way of helping people apply both analysis and intuition to finding better alternatives. That is what strategic planning should have focused on. I agree with Mintzberg in assigning importance to the generation of new and better alternatives as one potential benefit of strategy work, whether done by the line executive, a staff person, a consultant, or all of the above together.
I especially liked his awareness of the need for commitment. Involvement is a necessary part of gaining commitment, and the strategy processes that many use misses that important connection.
The book could have been improved, however, by doing some field work with companies which developed strategies that prospered well beyond their peers and seeming potential. What did they do that helped to create these results? Or was it a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day? Without answering that question, Mintzberg leaves us back in the pre Frederick Taylor days, except with a better idea of what does not work.
I have done substantial unpublished research on just that question. It is clear that there are several models that companies have used successfully to develop better strategies, implement them well, adapt to changes in a timely manner, and build systematically on success. I suggest you consider Clear Channel Communications as a company that focuses on rethinking the basic business model, Southwest Airlines as a company that achieves a superior cost position and efficiently transfers benefits from that to all stakeholder groups, and Linear Technology as a company that follows a strategy that should allow it to prosper regardless of the shifts in things it cannot stop or control.
No review of this book would be complete without noting that Mintzberg's persistent skepticism makes for some pretty humorous reading (unless you are one of the writers or planners he is questioning). Be sure you take time to enjoy the subtle humor in his writing.
Well done, Professor Mintzberg! I think this is the best work about how managers should manage their fundamental thinking that I have seen in the last 20 years.
You should be sure to read this book both to understand the lessons of strategic planning and what that implies for other thinking processes in your enterprise. You management education will not be complete until you do.
