Strategic Safari

- Henry Mintzberg

Presented By-
Akriti Gupta
Karuna Patel
 The ten Schools of Thoughts

The Ten Schools of Thought model from “Henry Mintzberg” is a

framework that can be used to categorize the field of Strategic
Management.

These 10 Schools of Thought are as follows:

• The Design School

• The Planning School
• The Positioning School
• The Entrepreneurial School
• The Cognitive School
•The Learning School
•The Power School
•The Cultural School
•The Environmental School
•The Configuration School Fig 1: Ten Schools
The Design School- Strategy Formation as a
process of conception

 Nature: Prescriptive
 The Design School proposes a model of strategy as achieving the essential fit
between internal strengths and weaknesses and external threats and opportunities.
 Motto : Establish fit
 Senior management formulates clear and simple strategies in a deliberate process
of conscious thought and communicates them to the staff so that everyone can
implement the strategies.
 This was the dominant view of the strategy process at least into the 1970s given its
implicit influence on most teaching and practice.
 Origin: P. Selznick’s “Leadership in Administration” and Alfred D. Chandler’s
“Strategy and Structure”
The Planning School- Strategy formation as a
formal process
 Nature : Prescriptive
 This school grew in parallel with the design school, but the Planning School
predominated by the mid- 1970's and though it faltered in the 1980's it continues
to be an important influence today
 It reflects most of the design school's assumptions except a rather significant one:
that the process was not just cerebral but formal, decomposable into distinct steps,
delineated by checklists, and supported by techniques
 This meant that staff planners replaced senior managers as the key players in the
process.
 Origin : H . Igor Ansoff’s “Corporate Strategy”
The Positioning School- Strategy formation as
an Analytical process
 Nature : Prescriptive
 This was the dominant view of strategy formulation in the 1980s
 In this view, strategy reduces to generic positions selected through formalized
analysis of industry situations—hence, planners became analysts
 This proved especially lucrative to consultants and academics alike, who could sink
their teeth into hard data and so promote their "scientific truths" to companies and
journals alike
 Origin : Sun Tzu, Michael Porter
The Entrepreneurial School- Strategy
formation as a visionary process
 Nature : Prescriptive and Descriptive
 Central concept : Vision
 Focused on the single leader,
 Also stressed the most innate of mental states and processes- intuition, judgement,
wisdom, experience, insight.
 Origin : J. A Schumpeter’s notion of “Creative Destruction”
The Cognitive School- Strategy formation as a
mental process

 Nature : Descriptive
 If strategies developed in people's mind as frames, models, or maps, what could be
understood about those mental processes?
 The job of the cognitive school : to get at what this process means in the sphere of
human cognition, drawing specially on the field of cognitive psychology
 Strategy is some kind of interpretation of the world
 Origin : H.A Simon
The Learning school- Strategy formation as an
emergent process

 Nature: Descriptive
 This school answers the question raised by the previous schools
Ques: How are strategists supposed to proceed?
Ans: they learn over time
 According to this school, strategies emerge as people, sometimes acting
individually but more often collectively, come to learn about a situation as well as
their organization’s capability of dealing with it.
 Origin: Charles Lindblom’s article “the science of muddling through”
The Power school- Strategy formation as a
process of negotiation

 This comparatively small, but quite different school has focused on strategy making
rooted in power in two ways:
 Micro power sees the development of strategies within the organization as
essentially political, a process involving bargaining, persuasion, and confrontation
among inside actors
 Macro power takes the organization as an entity that uses its power over others
and among its partners in alliances, joint ventures, and other network relationships
to negotiate "collective" strategies in its interests
 Origin: MacMillan’s text on “Strategy Formulation: Political Concepts”
The Cultural school- Strategy formation as a
collective process
 Opposing the power school, the cultural school focuses on common interest and
integration
 Strategy formation is viewed as a social process rooted in culture
 The theory concentrates on the influence of culture in discouraging significant
strategic change
 Culture became a big issue in the United States and Europe after the impact of
Japanese management (e.g. Kaizen) was fully realized in the 1980's and it grew
clear that strategic advantage can be the product of unique and difficult-to-imitate
cultural factors
The Environmental School- Strategy formation
as a reactive process

 the environmental school deserves attention for the light it throws on the
demands of the environment
 Among its most noticeable theories is the "contingency theory," that considers
what responses are expected of organizations that face particular environmental
conditions, and "population ecology," writings that claim severe limits to strategic
choice
The Configuration school- Strategy formation as
a process of transformation
 Two main sides of this school:
1.One describes state-of the organization and its surrounding context
2.Other describes the strategy making process- as transformation
 Transformation is an inevitable consequence of configuration
 It describes the relative stability of strategy within given states, interrupted by
occasional and rather dramatic leaps to new ones.
Thank You!