Henry Mintzberg's Crafting Strategy

Flashcards covering core terminology, theoretical frameworks, and key case concepts from Henry Mintzberg's 1987 Harvard Business Review article, 'Crafting Strategy'.

Crafting Strategy

A perspective on strategy making that evokes traditional craft skill, dedication, and mastery of detail, where formulation and implementation merge into a fluid, adaptive process of learning.

Realized Strategy

A pattern in action observed over time, reflecting the consistency in behavior an organization has actually pursued, regardless of whether it was consciously planned in advance.

Intended Strategy

A formal plan, guide, or explicit pronouncement formulated in advance to direct future organizational behavior.

Unrealized Strategy

Planned intentions and formulated strategies that fail to produce the desired actions and are never implemented in practice.

Emergent Strategy

A strategy that develops without clear intentions or in spite of them, forming as individual actions gradually converge into a consistent pattern over time.

Deliberate Strategy

A strategy brought about through a linear, conscious sequence where formal formulation is directly followed by precise implementation.

Attribution

The convention in strategic management and journalism of assuming that any realized organizational pattern must have been the deliberate intention of the chief executive.

Grass-Roots Strategy Making

The emergence of strategies like weeds in a garden, taking root wherever people have the capacity to learn and the resources to support that capacity before spreading to become organizational.

Hothouse Approach

Mintzberg's label for the conventional view of strategic management, which treats strategy as an exclusively planned, central, and deliberately controlled process.

Consensus Strategy

A pattern of action that arises spontaneously from many independent decisions made across an organization without senior management's prior intention or initial support.

Umbrella Strategy

A deliberately emergent strategy where senior management establishes broad boundaries or guidelines while allowing specific product and market maneuvers to emerge from lower levels.

Process Strategy

A strategy wherein management controls the process of strategy formation (staffing, structure, and procedures) while leaving the actual strategic content to operational experts.

Quantum Theory of Strategic Change

A theory by Danny Miller and Peter Friesen proposing that organizations alternate between long periods of evolutionary stability and short, disruptive bouts of revolutionary turmoil.

Strategic Revolution

A brief bout of revolutionary turmoil in which an organization rapidly alters many of its established strategies, structures, and culture to regain alignment with its environment.

Adhocracy

An innovative organization that produces individual or custom-made products and designs on an ad hoc, project basis (such as the National Film Board of Canada).

Cycles of Convergence and Divergence

A pattern of strategic change typical of creative organizations, alternating between periods of wide exploration (divergence) and focused consolidation around a unified theme (convergence).

The Impulsive Firm Running Blind

Miller and Friesen's archetype of an organization that continuously flits from one idea or acquisition to another without ever settling down to exploit a core distinctive competence.

Strategic Planning (Mintzberg's Definition)

An analytical process based on decomposition used not to create strategy, but to program, articulate, and operationalize a strategy that has already been created.

Subtle Discontinuities

Unprecedented, unexpected, and irregular shifts in an environment that may undermine an organization's future, identifiable through intimate involvement and perception rather than formal analysis.

Tracking Strategy Project

A research initiative started in 1971 at McGill University by Henry Mintzberg that tracked actions, inferred patterns, and mapped strategic histories across eleven organizations over multiple decades.