Binding: Digital
Format: Download: PDF
Label: Harvard Business Review
Manufacturer: Harvard Business Review
Number Of Pages: 10
Publication Date: 1987-07-01
Publisher: Harvard Business Review
Release Date: 2008-01-05
Studio: Harvard Business Review

Formal planning alone is not the best way for managers to develop strategy. Facts, figures, and forecasts are necessary; but managers also need an intuitive understanding of the organization, a feel for the business not unlike a potter's feel for the clay. Strategy is not just a plan for the future but also a pattern out of the past. Strategies are not always deliberate--they also emerge over time as organizations innovate and respond to their markets. By seeing patterns take shape in their environments, the best strategists find strategies as well as create them. McKinsey Award Winner.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Crafting Strategy
Comment: In "Crafting Strategy", Mintzberg wrote an incisive article on his views on strategy. He methodically explores the traditional way people view strategy as something planned by the strategist (could be CEO or Strategic Planning department) to be implemented by others. He, however, explains that managers' feel for the way the organization should be going can result in a series of decisions from which a strategy can emerge. In other words, strategies are not just a plan for the future that are deliberate but can emerge over time as firms respond to pressures in the operating environment and are compelled to innovate.

Mintzberg uses the metaphor of a potter which demonstrates involvement by the craftsman where the potter uses his/her skills, experience and dedication and makes adjustments as necessary as he/she is working on the product, resulting in a creative article being produced. In this way, Mintzberg shows that formal strategic planning alone is not enough to explain how managers develop strategies but also the intuitive knowledge of the firm and feel for the company enables managers to come up with creative decisions from which an innovative strategy emerges.

From his metaphor of a potter working with clay, Mintzberg develops his argument for personal strategy of experimentation which leads to consensus strategy that follow the trend in the industry, which arise from organizational people learning from the market what customers want.

The author also discusses the concept of umbrella strategy where senior managers set broad guidelines and leave the specifics to others in the organization resulting in a deliberate-emergent strategy. He also discusses the Process Strategy where management controls the process of strategy formation whilst leaving the actual content to others down the organizational hierarchy. The author explains that these deliberate-emergent strategies are essential in businesses that require great expertise and innovation.

Mintzberg also dispels the conventional view that change must be continuous with the organization adapting all the time but explains that strategic change takes place in quantum leaps (strategic revolutions) followed by periods of stability where change is only marginal.

Mintzberg labels "adhocracy" organizations that produce individual, custom made products in an innovative way, on a project basis.

Although this article was written under two decades ago, it still sounds very innovative and thought provoking. I have read the article several times over the years and I enjoy it every time. However, the article is not for the beginner in strategy but for those pursuing the subject at an advanced level, being familiar with literature on the subject.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: This is the Real World. Practical. Thoughtful. Energizing.
Comment: This article is a cornerstone of my thinking and consulting about strategy. It takes it from the head to the hands. His analogy of strategy like a potter at a potters wheel is breathtaking in the way it carries his real world insight to usable help for any business or organization.

Tom Brown
(...)

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Handcrafting strategy instead of strategic planning
Comment: Henry Mintzberg is Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is also Professor of Organization at ISEAD, the famous French business school. I would like to issue a word of warning to people who are not familiar with Henry Mintzberg, he is unlike any other business school professor. He likes to provoke and uses untraditional examples. For instance, in this article he compares the traditional strategic planning process with a single craftsman, a potter (I believe his wife).

"My thesis is simple: The crafting image potter captures the process by which effective strategies come to be. The planning image, long popular in the literature, distorts these processes and thereby misguides organizations that embrace it unreservedly." Initially, he explains the reasons why the strategic planning is ineffective. Then, he explains why strategies do not need to be deliberate and can emerge or shape. Mintzberg expands on the emergence of effective strategies. He introduces personal strategy (deliberate for one person but not for the organization), consensus strategy (follows trends), umbrella strategy (based on broad guidelines), and process strategy (strategy formation that leaves the actual content to others). Although most literature claims that change must continuous, research from McGill University shows that the opposite is true: "a strategic revolution must take place." Mintzberg concludes that managing strategy is "to craft thought and action, control and learning, stability and change." He discusses his viewpoint in detail with some great insights and examples: "Like potters at the wheel, organizations must make sense of the past if they hope to manage the future. ... Thus crafting strategy, like managing craft, requires a natural synthesis of the future, present, and past."

Yes, this article is very interesting. Amazingly enough this article was published in the same issue of the Harvard Business Review (July-August 1987) as Michael Porter's 'From Competitive Advantage to Corporate Strategy'. Both have almost completely opposite views on strategy and both won the McKinsey Award, but Mintzberg's writing style makes it possible to see them as complements to each other. The article is not that simple to read as it is pretty deep, but it provides great insights in the faults of traditional strategic planning (or budget process).

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