Mintzberg attributes to leadership the pivotal role in strategy making due to its capacity to overcome organisational inertia. Using the examples of Volkswagen‘s business strategy from the 1950s to 1970s and US military and political strategy in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, Mintzberg demonstrates that in the absence of push from the leadership, bureaucratic rigidity will preserve continuity even in the face of a rapidly changing environment.
Mintzberg offers evidence of ―self-reinforcing‖ strategies. Once accepted, the strategy of military pressure on North Vietnam led to ever-escalating military offensives. The leadership of President Johnson was not strong enough to overcome bureaucratic momentum and environmental pressures. It took a radical shift in environment and political leadership to change the course of action. The new president, Richard Nixon, faced military stalemate and made a political decision to change the strategy to ―vietnamisation‖ of the conflict.
Another Mintzberg and Waters (1982) study aimed to identify patterns of strategy process change in the context of a growing entrepreneurial firm in the retail industry. Mintzberg and Waters (1982) describe evolution of strategy process as it developed in conjunction with changing scope and structure. In its first stages, strategy making was entrepreneur-centred, informal and discretional, grounded in the very deep knowledge by the entrepreneur of slightest details of his business and his industry. As business grew larger and
ultimately involved many more owners. Pressure from emerging financial stakeholders contributed to the development of a formal ―planning‖ strategy mode. To a certain extent, the strategy process had to follow structure and submit to the demands of the environment.
Similar studies by Mintzberg and his co-authors included investigations of a Canadian film-making board, a textile giant, a university and an airline. The conceptualization of strategy process is performed in the study of ideal ―modes‖
of strategy-making (Mintzberg, 1973): entrepreneurial, adaptive and planning modes.
Configuration approach was criticized on a number of issues. Summarizing multifaceted, complex compositions of organisational structure, strategy and context into simple generic models of configuration means making rather crude generalisations of the real world situations (Donaldson, 1996). Moreover, as Donaldson (1996) observed in his criticism, the notion of ―quantum‖ change is also misleading. Most organisations change incrementally through a series of smaller steps over long periods of time.
Mintzberg et al (1998) readily admitted that configurations do not fully capture complexities of the real world. However, the configuration approach creates the necessary vocabulary and methodological apparatus to look at the temporal development of organisations and their strategies. The configuration school has only started to take off. What follows may come up with more complex and enduring classifications. In any event, simplification is necessary for understanding and conceptualising the reality. The real issue is to limit distortion as much as possible without going too deeply into unnecessary details.
Mintzberg et al (1998) conclude with the call for more nuanced enquiries into the corporate configurations.
The main conclusion of the configuration school as far as the strategy process is concerned is that strategy processes may vary according to particularities of a particular ―stage‖ of organisational development. In each stage an organisation would work out an optimal strategy process that fits its outer and
inner context. This combination may survive for some time, but dynamics in the inner and outer environment will sooner or later call for a major revamp. After a period of change, things settle down again to a new kind of steady state.
Therefore, studies of strategy process are best equipped when they take a temporal perspective and compare the strategy process in different points in time and in different contexts. This also corresponds to the call for strategy process research to be mindful of the surrounding organisational context advocated by the key methodology writers in the field. This research intends to take exactly this approach.
Models of Strategy Process
This section discusses empirically derived models of strategy process. It skips numerous normative models, most of them in the strategic planning domain, as less relevant and failing to encompass recent evolution in our thinking on the complexity of strategy making. Instead, the focus is on the empirically derived models as those can lend themselves to testing during the project.
The literature review has so far identified five such distinct models:
1. Hart (1992) offered an integrative framework aimed at capturing the phenomenon in all its diversity. The framework is based on the ―varying roles strategy makers and other organisational members play in the strategy making process‖. However, this typology focuses on the strategy making participants and doesn‘t directly encompass context characteristics in their full variety (although organisational attributes such as entrepreneurial style of bureaucratic processes do play a part in the model).
2. Shrivasta and Grant (1985) use a field study on the process of decision-making on a major IT investment to come up with a ―grounded‖ model of strategy process. Attributes of different modes include nature of process, process participants and their role, implicit aims of the process, roles of learning systems, and the influence of environment. Authors admit that
this model may serve as a ―first step‖ in the development of a truly comprehensive process model.
3. Miller and Friesen (1978) offer a typology based on the configuration approach that encompasses such attributes as the type of external environment (moderate or hostile), organisational structure (for example,
―entrepreneurial conglomerate‖), size and past records (for example, formerly successful big bureaucratic organisations coming under competitive attack by more agile newcomers), top team characteristics (―team spirit‖) and decision process attributes (such as the amount of formal analysis or responsiveness of decisions to the external environment). Overall, the model tracks 31 variables. Despite the model‘s comprehensiveness, a very divergent and complex nature of its process characteristics makes testing it a difficult task.
4. Mintzberg (1973) offers a shorter and somewhat more explicit model of
―strategy making modes‖, of which he identifies three ―pure‖ cases:
adaptive, planning and entrepreneurial, as well as a number of cross-breeds. He offers 15 characteristics of the process, including environment conditions, decisions makers, type of options evaluation, and dominant organisational goals. The strengths of the model are in its relative simplicity, focus on the process, but consideration of context characteristics and general applicability in the context of current research.
5. The already discussed model by Burgelman (1983) that examined the strategy process in a large diversified firm. Autonomous strategic behaviour induced by entrepreneurial activity of business units over time can challenge status quo and redefine corporate strategy. Top managers use the organisational context as a calibrating mechanism that limits deviations from current strategy concepts but which they can overcome by powerful strategic initiatives.
The Role of the Corporate Centre in Strategy Process in a Multi-business Corporation