The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning

The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning

In this article adopted from his book “the Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning ,Free Press and Prentice Hall International 1994” Henry Mintzberg argues that the label strategic planning should be dropped because strategic planning has impeded strategic thinking.

He states that Strategic Planning the way it has been adopted since the 1960’s is merely Strategic Programming, it involved the articulation and evaluations of strategies or visions that were already in practice, while the strategy making process should be capturing what business managers learn from all sources along with hard data and then synthesizing that learning into a vision of the direction the business should take.

Although very cynical about the strategy planning process , Mintzberg is not calling on companies to simply get rid of all their specialist planners , rather he is arguing that those planners can make their greatest contributions around the strategy making process rather than inside it by supplying the formal analysis or hard data that strategic thinking requires .

Minztberg shows concern that a bureaucratic, analytical planning process deceives managers into thinking that they are planning strategically and hence improving future organizational performance, and simultaneously avoiding responsibility for the results given that the Thinking part was separated from the doing part.

He concludes that strategic planning took this formal bureaucratic approach as the goal of those who were promoting strategic planning was only to reduce managers power over strategy making.

In further analysis of the bureaucratic approach strategic planning has taken, Mintzberg defines the grand fallacy of strategic planning is being confused with strategy making, he elaborates that this fallacy is based on three erroneous assumptions :

* The prediction that assumption is possible.

* Strategists can be detached from the subjects of their strategies

*...