The Nine Schools of Strategic Thinking
“Strategy formation is judgmental designing, intuitive visioning, and emergent learning; it is about transformation as well as perpetuation; it has to include analyzing before and programming after as well as negotiating during …” – Henry Mintzberg
Throughout time, a large amount of thinkers have addressed the issues related to business strategy systems from many different angles. To a large extent the difference in perspective can be understood from a wide range of base disciplines on which the strategy arguments are based, like for example economy, biology, anthropology, philosophy and politicology. Mintzberg emphasises this broad diversity of perspectives in the current debate and has identified nine main distinct schools in strategic thinking. Three of these schools – Design, Planning and Positioning School - are said to be prescriptive in nature and the other six schools – Entrepreneurial, Cognitive, Learning, Political, Cultural and Environmental School - are descriptive in nature.
As with any classification, there is a certain danger in the sense that trying to put rich individual ideas and concepts into a limited number of ‘boxes’ may lead to oversimplification. However, this classification of strategy schools does contribute to a deeper understanding of how strategy systems are perceived in a limited number of mainstreams of thinking. With a (corporate) strategy system being defined as the set of deliberate or non-deliberate processes that determines the focus, composition, scale and scope of corporate activities, in order to sustain distinctive strategic advantages over time [Kemp, 2003], the following concise review of the nine main schools of strategy thinking provides with a rich diversity of angles on how strategies are shaped, initiated, negotiated, formulated, implemented and improved – in other words, how strategy systems function.
The Design School – Strategy Systems as Processes of Conception
According to the design school, strategy
Throughout time, a large amount of thinkers have addressed the issues related to business strategy systems from many different angles. To a large extent the difference in perspective can be understood from a wide range of base disciplines on which the strategy arguments are based, like for example economy, biology, anthropology, philosophy and politicology. Mintzberg emphasises this broad diversity of perspectives in the current debate and has identified nine main distinct schools in strategic thinking. Three of these schools – Design, Planning and Positioning School - are said to be prescriptive in nature and the other six schools – Entrepreneurial, Cognitive, Learning, Political, Cultural and Environmental School - are descriptive in nature.
As with any classification, there is a certain danger in the sense that trying to put rich individual ideas and concepts into a limited number of ‘boxes’ may lead to oversimplification. However, this classification of strategy schools does contribute to a deeper understanding of how strategy systems are perceived in a limited number of mainstreams of thinking. With a (corporate) strategy system being defined as the set of deliberate or non-deliberate processes that determines the focus, composition, scale and scope of corporate activities, in order to sustain distinctive strategic advantages over time [Kemp, 2003], the following concise review of the nine main schools of strategy thinking provides with a rich diversity of angles on how strategies are shaped, initiated, negotiated, formulated, implemented and improved – in other words, how strategy systems function.
The Design School – Strategy Systems as Processes of Conception
According to the design school, strategy