Creating and Situating an Integrative Strategy Process 59
Projected events did not occur as anticipated or crises made the plans irrelevant
(Mintzberg 1994).
Many of the problems of strategic planning as practiced in these ways have
been explored in depth by Henry Mintzberg (1994) in The Rise and Fall of Strategic
Planning and in other writings, such as the jointly authored work Strategy Safari
(Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel 1998). He claims that strategic planning rests
on a series of fallacies including the beliefs that it is possible to predict the course
of the future, that thinking (as the formulation of plans) can be detached from
action (as the implementation of plans), and that formal systems of data collection
and analytical thinking can replace the intuitive and synthesizing skills of human
experience and intelligence. These flaws reduce to one grand fallacy: “Because
analysis is not synthesis, strategic planning has never been strategy making.... [It]
should have been called strategic programming” (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, Lampel
1998, 77).
The excesses of programmatic planning do not, of course, undercut the more
basic notions of strategy as strategic thinking and decision making. Mintzberg and
his associates identify a large variety of “schools,” or approaches to strategy, includ-
ing strategic planning and its variants. One of these schools emphasizes strategy
as the analytical positioning of products in a market, and another as a cultural
process of collective decision making. Others see it as a method of negotiation
for power, and yet others as establishing a vision. Some methods understand strat-
egy primarily to be a form of cognition, or, alternatively, as a way to enact a process
of organizational transformation (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel 1998).
Mintzberg gives considerable attention in various contexts to “emergent” strategy
as a form of learning. In emergent strategy, what we plan to do is not a function
of what we rationally calculate in advance, but what we discover we are already
doing. Our strategy may be born of a combination of both formal analysis and
intuitive understanding of promising directions that emerge in the normal course
of business (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel 1998). The notions that strategy is
discovered as much as it is invented, that it emerges from practice as much as it
is designed, and that it is grasped by intuition along with reason are all eminently
relevant in the world of thought and in the practices of universities, especially as
places that house many autonomous spheres of activity.
New Directions in Strategy: Integration and Leadership
What seems odd in Mintzberg’s analysis is the designation of separate schools
for what often appear simply to be different aspects of a potentially integrative
approach to the strategy process. Perhaps for the sake of debate, distinctions
are hardened into differences that could easily be reconciled, especially in the
sphere of practice. After elaborating on the schools and critiques of them through-
out a lengthy study, Mintzberg and his coauthors tacitly acknowledge this as they
outline an integrative approach to strategy development: “Strategy formation is
judgmental designing, intuitive visioning, and emergent learning: it is about