Introducing strategy and strategy making

Abstract

After reading this chapter you will be able to:

• familiarize yourself with strategy as both a theoretical concept and a working tool

• trace the history of the development and use of the strategy concept

• explore the various meanings of the term ‘strategy’

• make the link between different meanings and the different academic disciplines behind those meanings

• identify different stakeholder groups and their likely influence on strategy making

• discover the political, social and cognitive constraints on the process of strategy making

Why can’t strategy be ‘everything a company does or consists of’? Is that not strategy as perspective — in contrast to position? MINTZBERG AND LAMPEL, 1999: 26)

Strategy formation is judgmental designing, intuitive visioning, and emergent learning; it is about transformation as well as perpetuation; it must involve individual cognition and social interaction, cooperative as well as conflictive; it has to include analysing before and programming after as well as negotiating during: and all this must be in response to what may be a demanding environment. (MINTZBERG AND LAMPEL, 1999: 27)

Power takes that entity called organization and fragments it; culture knits a collection of individuals into an integrated entity called organization. In effect, one focuses primarily on self-interest, the other on common interest. (MINTZBERG ET AL. , 1998: 264)