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In this definitive and revealing history,
Henry Mintzberg, the iconoclastic former president of the
Strategic Management Society, unmasks the process that has
mesmerized so many organizations since 1965: strategic planning.
One of our most brilliant and original management thinkers,
Mintzberg concludes that the term is an oxymoron -- that
strategy cannot be planned because planning is about analysis
and strategy is about synthesis. That is why, he asserts,
the process has failed so often and so dramatically.
Mintzberg traces the origins and history
of strategic planning through its prominence and subsequent
fall. He argues that we must reconceive the process by which
strategies are created -- by emphasizing informal learning
and personal vision -- and the roles that can be played
by planners. Mintzberg proposes new and unusual definitions
of planning and strategy, and examines in novel and insightful
ways the various models of strategic planning and the evidence
of why they failed. Reviewing the so-called "pitfalls"
of planning, he shows how the process itself can destroy
commitment, narrow a company's vision, discourage change,
and breed an atmosphere of politics. In a harsh critique
of many sacred cows, he describes three basic fallacies
of the process -- that discontinuities can be predicted,
that strategies can be detached from the operations of the
organization, and that the process of strategy-making itself
can be formalized.
Mintzberg devotes a substantial section
to the new role for planning, plans, and planners, but in
support of it, providing some of its inputs and sometimes
programming its outputs as well as encouraging strategic
thinking in general. This book is required reading for anyone
in an organization who is influenced by the planning or
the strategy-making processes.
Henry Mintzberg is a visiting professor
at INSEAD in France and a two-time winner of the prestigious
McKinsey Award for the best Harvard Business Review
article. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada -- the
first fellow elected from a management faculty -- he is
the author of several seminal books including Mintzberg
on Management (Free Press, 1989).
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