Mintzberg: a plan is not a strategy
Most strategy forms while you act, and only afterwards does somebody write it down. A written plan does not mean a strategy exists.
A club's real strategy lives in the stream of actions — the pattern you recognise only looking back was assembled from many separate decisions nobody lined up in advance.
- A document written during one term of officeWhere the money and the hours go each year
- Direction devised by people cut off from the workThe information that matters is soft and only available on the spot
- A procedure stands in for thinkingAnalysis is not synthesis
- The situation
The club has a strategy written last year and not opened since.
- What the model says
There is a strategy anyway, just elsewhere — in the five biggest lines of money and hours from the last twelve months.
- What you do
Write those five lines down and mark how many match the plan; if under half match, decide at the next meeting which of the two lists you are changing.
What it claims
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Who created it
Why this is your problem
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Why gslk uses it
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Where it runs in the product
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Source
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The primary source is in copyright. This page retells it in our own words and cites it rather than reproducing it.
These works are related to the one you just read — and not by accident:
shared competencies: Strategy, Judgement, Continuity
shared competencies: Strategy, Judgement
shared competencies: Strategy, Judgement
shared competencies: Strategy, Judgement
Of the ten gslk competency domains, this work grounds:
The same work written for a member: what to do with it in the club.
Links to publishers and libraries. There are no links to unauthorised copies here, and there will not be.
- Mintzberg in HBR — the book's argument as an article
- Mintzberg and Waters (1985) — Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent
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