Strategic Management

Mintzberg’s Strategy Continuum: Philosophic and Theoretical Underpinnings

Naveed Yazdani
Chair
Department of Business Administration
School of Business & Economics
University of Management & Technology
[e-mail] & [e-mail]

Abstract

This theoretical paper views Henry Mintzberg’s ‘Strategy Safari’ as representing a strategy continuum along which different styles/modes of strategy making and implementing are spread, with Prescriptive/Planning style of strategizing at one end and the Descriptive/Learning mode of strategizing at the other end. The paper attempts to highlight some of the reasons behind the traditional ‘hype’ created for the Prescriptive/Planning mode, its impact on the teaching behavior of the teachers of strategic management and, the underlying philosophical and theoretical assumptions behind the two extreme end of the strategy continuum. Based on these underpinnings, the paper presents some propositions and calls for launching research efforts to test and verify these propositions. The paper proposes to include the strategy continuum view for the teaching of Strategic Management courses at graduate and under-graduate levels in the business schools.

Key Words: Strategy, Prescriptive Schools of Strategy, Descriptive Schools of Strategy, Strategic Management, Strategy-Continuum

The first chapter of Henry Mintzberg et al. (1998) work, Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour through the Wilds of Strategic Management, starts with the ancient Sufi tale ‘The blind men and the elephant’, and the writers, after quoting the poem by John Godfrey Saxe (1816 – 1887), write:

“We (the strategy makers) are the blind people and strategy formation is our elephant. Since no one has had the vision to see the entire beast, everyone has grabbed hold of some part or the other and ‘railed on in utter ignorance’ about the rest. We certainly do not get an elephant by adding its parts. An elephant is more than that. Yet to comprehend the whole we also

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