Section Two: Mintzberg And Waters Categories Of Strategy.

“Organizational Management and Leadership” defines planning as “the development of goals, which leads to the development of an overall strategy for achieving those goals. Planning can be performed at all levels of an organization. Supervisors are planning when a weekly work schedule is put together for hourly staff. Top executives are planning when they define the mission statement of the company and determine how the organization can maintain its competitive advantage.”

1. What lessons do you learn from Justin’s experience in terms of the limits of some of the core strategy frameworks you learned in theory (examine for example, Michael Porter’s Five Forces and the challenges Justice faced in applying it, value chain analysis, the Resource Based View)

Hentry Mintzberg and James A Waters give various types of strategies to improve business and business organizations. Their strategies can be summaries into eight. They are planned strategy, Entrepreneurial strategy, Ideological Strategy, Umbrella strategy, Process Strategy, Unconnected Strategy, Consensus Strategy and Imposed Strategy. The strategies can be briefly explained below.

In his article, “The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning,” Henry Mintzberg (1994) provides his views on the process of strategic planning. He offers that most companies and organizations start a strategic planning process with little understanding of the definition or actual purpose of planning. He tends to admonish much of the conventional understanding concerning strategic planning and proposes his interpretations. He states that “the most successful strategies are visions, not plans” (Mintzberg, 1994, p. 107).

Intended strategy is the strategy that an organization hopes to execute. Intended strategies are usually described in detail within an organization’s strategic plan (Flat World Education, 2015).

A competitive strategy, or business-level strategy, is the way a business used to successfully enter and penetrate into a market (Eastwood et al, 2006), and also, to succeed in this chosen market against its competitors (Johnson et al, 2014). A company needs to develop and apply appropriate strategy to help the company to generate distinctive competences (David, 2007). Compared with the strategies implemented in other levels of operation, competitive strategy is more focused on the competition against other competitors and strategic choices to better attain market share (Harrison and St. John, 2009). According to

Strategic planning involves making decisions about the organization’s long-term goals and strategies and how the organization decides to implement their goals (Bateman, Snell, Konopaske, pg. 113). Strategies help organizations to have a clear perspective on how to go about accomplishing the goals they have in place. All organizations have a clear vision of what their mission and purpose as a company is, they know how to fulfill the mission, vision, and purpose and they know how to ensure that they accomplish all their goals. However, the route the organization takes to define these things determines how effective they will be.

The fourth step into the creation of executable strategies relies in the alignment of resources, purposes, and strategical thinking contemplations into reality. The rationale of this step is to create

There are various schools of strategy that have been vigorously debated on and after a consolidated effort; three schools of strategy were produced. They are the planning school, the positional school, and the resource based school of strategy (Ritson, 2013). All these strategies will be described with examples to buttress each.

Being able to understand the differences between a company’s intended strategies and the evolution of a company affected by external forces. strategies that were planed and measured by goals that were set as a company would be considered intendent strategies. When it comes to emergent strategies they would be classified as decisions made by the company that were reactions to new innovations and the always changing consumer need. Failing to be able to adapt to the changing conditions of the market would not only signal a break down in the organizational structure but also could be the end of the company. A strong intendent strategy is very important when it comes to giving a company direction and setting goals for

Strategy refers to a course of action that is adopted by an organisation in order to achieve its set goals and objectives. According to Mintzberg and Water (1985) strategy can either be deliberate or emergent depending on whether the course of action taken by the organisation is articulated and communicated to the whole organisation or whether the course of action was not explicitly intended. Mintzberg categorizes Strategy as a deliberate, rational and sequential planning process if the course of action is well thought prior to implementation, articulated, communicated to members of the organisation, and a clear plan of action is established. However, it is worth

Strategic planning plays a crucial role in the successful journey of the companies and it open new roads of opportunities and success for the business organizations. The business organizations focus mainly on secrecy of the strategies from all within or outside the organization for raising the level of successful achievement of the goals of the company. Different companies choose different means of strategic planning as some companies keep the strategies secret even from the middle and lower management and only senior

Alfred Chandler(1963) defines strategy as ‘ the determination of the long-run goals and objectives of an enterprise and the adoption of courses of action of an enterprise and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals’. And Michael porter(1996) sees it as ‘Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value’.

Strategy was shaped from the top but also from every person in the company as she adapted the deliberate strategy to her work. The existence of an emergent strategy led to the question of how top management could influence it (through, among other tools, MCS). The concepts of interactive and boundary systems (Simons 1995)—with the purpose of managing these ‘‘unexpected’’ decisions—captured this new role for MCS. If day-to-day actions modify top management deliberate strategy, then why should top management go all the way to formulating it? The answer to this question led to the next step in the evolution of our understanding of the strategic process. Research suggested that top management does not formulate a deliberate strategy that is then randomly mixed with the emergent strategy. Rather, top management knows that the deliberate strategy is never implemented; instead of trying to force it, top management focuses on defining the guidelines that shape the emergent strategy (Burgelman 2002). The process of setting up these guidelines to induce certain strategic behavior is captured in the idea of intended strategic actions (lower left quadrant). These guidelines reflect top management’s objectives rather than prescribe what the organization should do. This idea was further refined through the observation that emergent strategy included two very different types of outcomes. Often emergent strategy evolved

Strategic planning is central to management study. It defines the long term direction for the company and all other business functions orbit around their established strategies. This article studies how a company formulates business-level strategies, optimize their competitive positioning and obtain a competitive advantage over their rivals.