Strickberg's Ten Schools Of Thought In Strategic Management

Schools of Thought | Strategic Management

The following study’s scope consists of understanding the essence of Business Strategy, Levels of Strategy & perspectives of Strategic Management.

Strickland and Thompson (2003, p.3) describes Strategy as a blend between competitive moves and business approaches adopted by managers to satisfy customer needs, to remain competitive & to achieve organizational objectives.

The steps followed by a company in order to achieve the desired position is the layman understanding of Strategic Management. Strickland and Thompson (2003, p.6) identify Strategic Management as the managerial process of forming a strategic vision, setting objectives, crafting a strategy, implementing & executing the strategy, and then

Operational Level Strategy: the contribution of the resources, processes & people to the corporate & business level strategy.

Mintzberg’s Ten Schools of Thought in Strategic Management

Mintzberg, Ahlstrand & Lampel (1998) identified 10 key schools of thought in concluding an extensive research of literature in 1998. They then classified the identified schools of thought into 3 groupings.

The first they call, Perspective Schools, ones that are ‘more concerned with how strategies should be created than with how they necessarily do form’. This consists of the Design, Planning & Positioning Schools.

The second main group was termed Descriptive School, comprising of Entrepreneurial, Cognitive, Learning, Power, Cultural & Environmental Schools. These do not prescribe how strategy should be but rather to describe how it is made in practice.

The final group is, Configurational.

The Design School identifies strategy as achieving the essential fit between internal strengths & weaknesses and external threats & opportunities. Strategic management is driven by clear & unique strategies. Strategies formed by the senior management are often in a deliberate process of conscious thought neither formally analytical nor informally intuitive. In this process the internal situation of the organization corresponds to the external

In this view Strategic management controls the businesses strategy by reducing it to generic positions selected through formalized analysis of industry situations, hence planners become analysts.

The Entrepreneurial School identifies the strategy formation as a visionary process. Unlike in the design school and in contrast to the planning school, the rooted the process in the mysteries of intuition. Strategic management takes place within the mind of the charismatic founder or leader of the organization.

Examples: Start-ups, Niche players, privately owned companies and ‘turnaround’ situations.

The School of Cognition distinguishes strategy formation as a mental process. It considers how people perceive patterns and process information. Strategic management is confined to what is happening in the mind of the strategist and how it processes information. Another branch of this school adopted a more subjective interpretative view of the strategy process; that cognition is used to construct strategies as creative interpretations. Positives Negatives

2. School of Design - Process is