Source: ThePursuit of WOW! 1994 TPG Communications. All rightsreserved.

enry Mintzberg has killed strategic planning.

Its not that the prolific McGill University pro-
fessor has anything new to say in his just-
released book, TheRiseand Fall of Strategic
Planning. And its not as if our mindless love affair
with planning in the 1960s and 1970s didnt effectively end a
dozen years ago (when then-neophyte GE chairman Jack
Welch killed his corporations hyper-formalized planning
system, and most of the planners along with it). Its just that
this academic yet sprightly text is, well, so encyclopedic, so
damning ... and so final. It puts the last nails in the coffin; it
closes, decisively, a major chapter of the American manage-
ment saga. The dead horse need not be beaten again.
My own reading of the book consumed (correct word) a
plane trip to London, a full night in New Delhi, then two
more dusk-to-dawn stints in Dubai. The catharsis was pro-
found. From time to time Id even find myself sweating,
despite a chill air conditioning which kept me under blan-
kets.
So far so bad, proclaimed the renowned political scien-
tist Aaron Wildavsky, in 1973, of the elaborate planning
processes introduced into the public sector by Robert (body-
count Bob) McNamara when he was U.S. Secretary of
Defense.
Others went farther. A good deal of corporate planning ...
is like a ritual rain dance, wrote Dartmouths Brian Quinn.
It has no effect on the weather that follows, but those who
engage in it think it does. ... Moreover, much of the advice
related to corporate planning is directed at improving the
dancing, not the weather. Columbias Len Sayles chimed in,
Apparently our society, not unlike the Greeks with their
Delphic oracles, takes great comfort in believing that very
talented seers removed from the hurly-burly world of reality
can foretell coming events. Two other observers, M.L. Gimpl
and S.R. Dakin, added, Managements enchantment with
the magic of long-range planning ... is a manifestation of
anxiety relieving superstitious behavior.
Mintzberg hardly limits himself to such gratuitous, if
deadly accurate, barbs. In chapter after chapter of systematic
research reviews he meticulously builds his case. For instance
theres the French academic, upon a thorough consideration
of planning effectiveness in 1978, who succinctly concludes,
Those who say they make plans and that these work are
liars. The term planning is imbecilic; everything can change
tomorrow.
But Igor Ansoff was not so easily deterred. The oft-quoted
champion of planning in the 1960s (and producer of some of
the most elaborate and ludicrous, in hindsight plan-
ning schemes of all time) apparently destroys his own posi-
tion. Recently I asked three corporate executives, he wrote
in 1970, what decisions they had made in the last year that
would not have been made were it not for their corporate
plans. All had difficulty identifying one such decision. Since
all of the plans are marked secret or confidential, I asked
them how their competitors might benefit from possession
of their plans. Each answered
with embarrassment that the
competitors would not bene-
fit. Did Ansoff respond to
such withering attacks by
questioning the validity of
strategic planning?Hardly.
Instead, he went on, in a land-
mark textbook gobbled up by
practitioners, to further elabo-
rate his already tedious
scheme.
But, Mintzberg observes,
its not just that planning
doesnt work. Its downright
dangerous. One hundred years
ago an early champion of
planning, Henri Fayol, admit-
ted as much. Planning schemes, he said, not only dont
encourage flexibility (the only sane response to changing
times), but actually suppress it. Quinn observed, decades
later, that the annual planning process was rarely and
never, he claimed, in his research the source of ... radical
departures into entirely different product/market realms.
The button-down nature of the procedure per se, he added,
essentially foreclose(s) radical ... innovation.
The meat of Mintzbergs magisterial review is a brick-by-
brick analysis of plannings problems. Consider just three:
1. Process kills. Process was king for the champi-
ons of strategic planning. They exhibit a passionate attach-
ment to dispassion, said one wry commentator. They are
more set on deciding rightly than upon right decisions,
another chimed in. Mintzberg reports with amusement: By
the middle of June, wrote [ Professors] Lorange and Vancil of
planning in a large diversified multinational, top manage-
ment has prepared an explicit statement of corporate strate-
gy and goals. One can almost see the executives sitting
around the table at 11 p.m. on the 14th of June, working
Strategic Planning, R.I.P.
A gooddeal of
corporate planning
... is like a ritual
raindance, it has
no effect onthe
weather that
follows, but those
who engage init
think it does.
BrianQuinn, Dartmouth
1
tompeters!
H
TOM PETERS
furiously to complete their
strategy on time.
Mintzberg saves many of
his best shots for Mariann
Jelinek, who in the late 1970s
gushed about Texas
Instruments rococo
Objectives, Tactics and
Strategies system, a scheme
that one TI exec later described
as a paperwork mill that
makes it absolutely impossible
to respond to anything that
moves quickly. (TI, like GE
under Welch, trashed its sys-
tem following a long string of
marketplace blunders.)
Mintzberg views Jelineks belief
in the possibility of institu-
tionalizing innovation as the
final performance of a long-
running play. The revolution that [ time and motion study
pioneer Frederick] Taylor initiated in the factory was [ now]
in the process of being repeated at the apex of the hierarchy,
and it would be fundamentally no different. The reduction
of strategy making to a mechanical act capable of being per-
fected, like Taylors Schmidt and pursuit of the ideal way to
shovel coal, was fundamentally wrong, and included the
seeds of its own destruction. The obsession for control mir-
rored in planning schemes, wrote James Worthy, springs
from the failure to recognize or appreciate the value of spon-
taneity.
2. Hard data aint. Not surprisingly, fanatics for
process are also gaga for hard data. Yet Mintzberg thoroughly
exposes the soft underbelly of hard data, what he calls
strategic plannings near fatal assumption of quantification.
Plannings emphasis on hard data and facts leads to
the fallacy of measuring whats measurable. The results are
limiting at best, for example a pronounced tendency to
favor cost leadership strategies (that is, ones that emphasize
internal operating efficiencies, which are generally measur-
able) over product leadership strategies (which emphasize
innovative design or high quality, which tends to be less
measurable).
More generally, Mintzberg claims, an abiding emphasis
on the measurable dismisses as irrelevant the random noise,
gossip [ and] impressions that are vital to adapting in a tur-
bulent environment. He approvingly quotes Harvard scholar
Richard Neustadt, advisor to several presidents: It is not
information of a general sort that helps a President ... not
surveys, not the bland amalgams. Rather ... it is the odds and
ends of tangible detail that pieced together ... illuminate the
underside of issues.
Mintzberg concludes:
(a) Hard information is often limited in scope, lacking
richness and often fails to encompass important non-eco-
nomic and non-quantitative factors ...
(b) Much hard information is too aggregated for effec-
tive use in strategy making ...
(c) Much hard information arrives too late to be of use
in strategy making ...
(d) Finally, a surprising amount of hard information is
unreliable [ thanks to our tendency] to assume that any-
thing expressed in figures must necessarily be precise.
Overall, Mintzberg opines, While hard data may inform
the intellect, it is largely soft data that generate wisdom.
They may be difficult to analyze, but they are indispensable
for synthesis the key to strategy making.
3. Woebetide the separation of
thought and action. Mintzberg next pounces on
the assumption of detachment, quantifications close kin.
If the system does the thinking, he adduces, the thought
must be detached from the action, strategy from operations,
[ and] ostensible thinkers from doers. ... It is this disassocia-
tion of thinking from acting that lies close to the root of
[ strategic plannings] problem.
Ah, those heady days when planning ruled the roost!
Mintzberg, with near disbelief and undisguised contempt,
cites an astonishing statement by a British planning man-
ager: Through the [ planning] process we can stop managers
falling in love with their businesses. Such was the unabashed
goal, as another British executive reports with alarm: The
chief executive of a group of world-famous management
consultants tried hard to convince me [ in the early 1960s]
that it is ideal that top management ... should have as little
knowledge as possible relative to the product.
Of course Mintzberg hardly dismisses the value of some
detachment (seeing forests as well as trees, and all that).
Effective strategists, he wrote in summary, are not people
who abstract themselves from the daily details but quite the
opposite: They are the ones who immerse themselves in it,
while being able to extract the strategic messages from it. He
marvels at a successful Canadian retail firms top managers,
who readily invest themselves in a question about the quali-
ty of a shipment of strawberries with the same passion and
commitment as in a question about opening a chain of
restaurants. It is such intimate knowledge, he adds, that
informed their more global vision.
To expose the problems of planning schemes still misses
the point. It implies, shades of Ansoff s response to evidence
While harddata
may informthe
intellect, it is largely
soft data that gen-
erate wisdom. They
may be difficult to
analyze, but they
are indispensable for
synthesis
the key to
strategy making.
HenryMintzberg
2
of plannings ineffectiveness, that a fix is possible. But sup-
pose, Wildavsky mused, that the failures of planning are not
peripheral or accidental but integral to its very nature. To
say that Mintzberg applauds this line of reasoning is under-
statement. The case so far, in fact, is mere prelude to the fun-
damental assumption underlying strategic planning, that
analysis will produce synthesis, [ that] decomposition of the
process of strategy making into a series of articulated steps ...
will produce integrated strategies.
Rubbish, snorts Mintzberg, lighting off a final, massive
display of intellectual pyrotechnics that encompasses every-
thing from economic to physiological (right brain-left brain)
research. Planning by its very nature, he claims, defines
and preserves categories. Creativity, by its very nature, cre-
ates categories, or rearranges established ones. This is why
strategic planning can neither provide creativity, nor deal
with it when it emerges by other means. Strategies that are
novel and compelling, he adds, seem to be the product of
single, creative brains ... capable of synthesizing a vision. The
key to this [ is] integration rather than decomposition, based
on holistic images rather than linear words.
Having demolished strategic planning, Mintzberg pro-
ceeds to throw a life ring to planners, who he acknowledges
can range from the obsessively Cartesian to the playfully
intuitive. Strategies that break the mold, he says, grow ini-
tially like weeds, they are not cultivated like tomatoes in a
hot house ... [ They] can take root in all kinds of places. To
effectively manage the strategy-making process, then, is
not to preconceive strategies but to recognize their emer-
gence and intervene when appropriate. Thence Mintzbergs
primary role for modern, artful planners: finders of strate-
gies rather than designers of strategies. They may best serve
their firms by discovering fledgling strategies in unexpected
pockets of the organization so that consideration can be
given to [ expanding] them.
Mintzberg observes, ironically, that our passion for plan-
ning has mostly flourished during stable times (e.g., the
1960s). When faced with discontinuities of the sort that have
become routine today, planners have been caught in their
concrete boots, looking back over their shoulders, and rout-
ed. The importance of greeting discontinuities with bold
strategies is more significant than ever. Just dont expect such
fast footwork and zany departures to emerge from green eye-
shade analysts promoting just-the-hard-facts-maam, system-
atic planning schemes.
R.I.P. strategic planning as we knew it and tried to love it.
And thank you, Henry. Now can I please get some sleep?
Dubai
28 February 1994
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