Source: The Pursuit of WOW! © 1994 TPG Communications. All rights reserved.

enry Mintzberg has killed strategic planning.It’s not that the prolific McGill University pro-fessor has anything new to say in his just-

released book, The Rise and Fall of StrategicPlanning. And it’s not as if our mindless love affair

with planning in the 1960s and 1970s didn’t effectively end adozen years ago (when then-neophyte GE chairman JackWelch killed his corporation’s hyper-formalized planningsystem, and most of the planners along with it). It’s just thatthis academic yet sprightly text is, well, so encyclopedic, sodamning ... and so final. It puts the last nails in the coffin; itcloses, decisively, a major chapter of the American manage-ment saga. The dead horse need not be beaten again.

My own reading of the book consumed (correct word) aplane trip to London, a full night in New Delhi, then twomore dusk-to-dawn stints in Dubai. The catharsis was pro-found. From time to time I’d even find myself sweating,despite a chill air conditioning which kept me under blan-kets.

“So far so bad,” proclaimed the renowned political scien-tist Aaron Wildavsky, in 1973, of the elaborate planningprocesses introduced into the public sector by Robert (body-count Bob) McNamara when he was U.S. Secretary ofDefense.

Others went farther. “A good deal of corporate planning ...is like a ritual rain dance,” wrote Dartmouth’s Brian Quinn.“It has no effect on the weather that follows, but those whoengage in it think it does. ... Moreover, much of the advicerelated to corporate planning is directed at improving thedancing, not the weather.” Columbia’s Len Sayles chimed in,“Apparently our society, not unlike the Greeks with theirDelphic oracles, takes great comfort in believing that verytalented ‘seers’ removed from the hurly-burly world of realitycan foretell coming events.” Two other observers, M.L. Gimpland S.R. Dakin, added, “Management’s enchantment withthe magic of long-range planning ... is a manifestation ofanxiety relieving superstitious behavior.”

Mintzberg hardly limits himself to such gratuitous, ifdeadly accurate, barbs. In chapter after chapter of systematicresearch reviews he meticulously builds his case. For instancethere’s the French academic, upon a thorough considerationof planning effectiveness in 1978, who succinctly concludes,“Those who say they make plans and that these work areliars. The term planning is imbecilic; everything can changetomorrow.”

But Igor Ansoff was not so easily deterred. The oft-quotedchampion of planning in the 1960s (and producer of some of

the most elaborate — and ludicrous, in hindsight — plan-ning schemes of all time) apparently destroys his own posi-tion. “Recently I asked three corporate executives,” he wrotein 1970, “what decisions they had made in the last year thatwould not have been made were it not for their corporateplans. All had difficulty identifying one such decision. Sinceall of the plans are marked ‘secret’ or ‘confidential,’ I askedthem how their competitors might benefit from possessionof their plans. Each answeredwith embarrassment that thecompetitors would not bene-fit.” Did Ansoff respond tosuch withering attacks byquestioning the validity ofstrategic planning? Hardly.Instead, he went on, in a land-mark textbook gobbled up bypractitioners, to further elabo-rate his already tediousscheme.

But, Mintzberg observes,it’s not just that planningdoesn’t work. It’s downrightdangerous. One hundred yearsago an early champion ofplanning, Henri Fayol, admit-ted as much. Planning schemes, he said, not only don’tencourage flexibility (the only sane response to changingtimes), but actually suppress it. Quinn observed, decadeslater, that the annual planning process was rarely — andnever, he claimed, in his research — “the source of ... radicaldepartures into entirely different product/market realms.”The button-down nature of the procedure per se, he added,“essentially foreclose(s) radical ... innovation.”

The meat of Mintzberg’s magisterial review is a brick-by-brick analysis of planning’s problems. Consider just three:

1. Process kills. Process was king for the champi-ons of strategic planning. They exhibit a “passionate attach-ment to dispassion,” said one wry commentator. They are“more set on deciding rightly than upon right decisions,”another chimed in. Mintzberg reports with amusement: “ ‘Bythe middle of June,’ wrote [Professors] Lorange and Vancil ofplanning in a large diversified multinational, ‘top manage-ment has prepared an explicit statement of corporate strate-gy and goals.’ One can almost see the executives sittingaround the table at 11 p.m. on the 14th of June, working

Strategic Planning, R.I.P.

“A good deal of

corporate planning

... is like a ritual

rain dance, it has

no effect on the

weather that

follows, but those

who engage in it

think it does.”—Brian Quinn, Dartmouth

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tompeters!

HT O M P E T E R S

furiously to complete theirstrategy on time.”

Mintzberg saves many ofhis best shots for MariannJelinek, who in the late 1970sgushed about TexasInstruments’ rococoObjectives, Tactics andStrategies system, a schemethat one TI exec later describedas “a paperwork mill thatmakes it absolutely impossibleto respond to anything thatmoves quickly.” (TI, like GEunder Welch, trashed its sys-tem following a long string ofmarketplace blunders.)Mintzberg views Jelinek’s beliefin the possibility of “institu-tionalizing innovation” as thefinal performance of a long-

running play. “The revolution that [time and motion studypioneer Frederick] Taylor initiated in the factory was [now]in the process of being repeated at the apex of the hierarchy,and it would be fundamentally no different.” The reductionof strategy making to a mechanical act capable of being per-fected, like Taylor’s Schmidt and pursuit of the ideal way toshovel coal, was fundamentally wrong, and included theseeds of its own destruction. The “obsession for control mir-rored in planning schemes,” wrote James Worthy, “springsfrom the failure to recognize or appreciate the value of spon-taneity.”

2. Hard data ain’t. Not surprisingly, fanatics forprocess are also gaga for hard data. Yet Mintzberg thoroughlyexposes the “soft underbelly of hard data,” what he callsstrategic planning’s near fatal “assumption of quantification.”

Planning’s emphasis on “hard data” and “facts” leads tothe fallacy of “measuring what’s measurable.” The results arelimiting at best, for example a pronounced tendency “tofavor ‘cost leadership’ strategies (that is, ones that emphasizeinternal operating efficiencies, which are generally measur-able) over product leadership strategies (which emphasizeinnovative design or high quality, which tends to be lessmeasurable).”

More generally, Mintzberg claims, an abiding emphasison the measurable dismisses as irrelevant the “random noise,gossip [and] impressions” that are vital to adapting in a tur-bulent environment. He approvingly quotes Harvard scholarRichard Neustadt, advisor to several presidents: “It is notinformation of a general sort that helps a President ... notsurveys, not the bland amalgams. Rather ... it is the odds and

ends of tangible detail that pieced together ... illuminate theunderside of issues.”

Mintzberg concludes:(a) “Hard information is often limited in scope, lackingrichness and often fails to encompass important non-eco-nomic and non-quantitative factors ...

(b) “Much hard information is too aggregated for effec-tive use in strategy making ...

(c) “Much hard information arrives too late to be of usein strategy making ...

(d) “Finally, a surprising amount of hard information isunreliable [thanks to our tendency] to assume that any-thing expressed in figures must necessarily be precise.”

Overall, Mintzberg opines, “While hard data may informthe intellect, it is largely soft data that generate wisdom.They may be difficult to ‘analyze,’ but they are indispensablefor ‘synthesis’ — the key to strategy making.”

3. Woebetide the separation ofthought and action. Mintzberg next pounces onthe “assumption of detachment,” quantification’s close kin.“If the system does the thinking,” he adduces, “the thoughtmust be detached from the action, strategy from operations,[and] ostensible thinkers from doers. ... It is this disassocia-tion of thinking from acting that lies close to the root of[strategic planning’s] problem.”

Ah, those heady days when planning ruled the roost!Mintzberg, with near disbelief and undisguised contempt,cites an “astonishing” statement by a British planning man-ager: “Through the [planning] process we can stop managersfalling in love with their businesses.” Such was the unabashedgoal, as another British executive reports with alarm: “Thechief executive of a group of world-famous managementconsultants tried hard to convince me [in the early 1960s]that it is ideal that top management ... should have as littleknowledge as possible relative to the product.”

Of course Mintzberg hardly dismisses the value of somedetachment (seeing forests as well as trees, and all that).Effective strategists, he wrote in summary, “are not peoplewho abstract themselves from the daily details but quite theopposite: They are the ones who immerse themselves in it,while being able to extract the strategic messages from it.” Hemarvels at a successful Canadian retail firm’s top managers,who readily “invest themselves in a question about the quali-ty of a shipment of strawberries with the same passion andcommitment as in a question about opening a chain ofrestaurants.” It is such “intimate knowledge,” he adds, “thatinformed their more global vision.”

To expose the problems of planning schemes still missesthe point. It implies, shades of Ansoff ’s response to evidence

“While hard data

may inform the

intellect, it is largely

soft data that gen-

erate wisdom. They

may be difficult to

‘analyze,’ but they

are indispensable for

‘synthesis’ —

the key to

strategy making.”—Henry Mintzberg

2

of planning’s ineffectiveness, that a fix is possible. But sup-pose, Wildavsky mused, that “the failures of planning are notperipheral or accidental but integral to its very nature.” Tosay that Mintzberg applauds this line of reasoning is under-statement. The case so far, in fact, is mere prelude to the fun-damental assumption underlying strategic planning, that“analysis will produce synthesis, [that] decomposition of theprocess of strategy making into a series of articulated steps ...will produce integrated strategies.”

Rubbish, snorts Mintzberg, lighting off a final, massivedisplay of intellectual pyrotechnics that encompasses every-thing from economic to physiological (right brain-left brain)research. “Planning by its very nature,” he claims, “definesand preserves categories. Creativity, by its very nature, cre-ates categories, or rearranges established ones. This is whystrategic planning can neither provide creativity, nor dealwith it when it emerges by other means.” Strategies that are“novel and compelling,” he adds, “seem to be the product ofsingle, creative brains ... capable of synthesizing a vision. Thekey to this [is] integration rather than decomposition, basedon holistic images rather than linear words.”

Having demolished strategic planning, Mintzberg pro-ceeds to throw a life ring to planners, who he acknowledgescan range from the “obsessively Cartesian to the playfullyintuitive.” Strategies that break the mold, he says, “grow ini-

tially like weeds, they are not cultivated like tomatoes in ahot house ... [They] can take root in all kinds of places.” Toeffectively “manage” the strategy-making process, then, is“not to preconceive strategies but to recognize their emer-gence and intervene when appropriate.” Thence Mintzberg’sprimary role for modern, artful planners: “finders” of strate-gies rather than designers of strategies. They may best servetheir firms by discovering “fledgling strategies in unexpectedpockets of the organization so that consideration can begiven to [expanding] them.”

Mintzberg observes, ironically, that our passion for plan-ning has mostly flourished during stable times (e.g., the1960s). When faced with discontinuities of the sort that havebecome routine today, planners have been caught in theirconcrete boots, looking back over their shoulders, and rout-ed. The importance of greeting discontinuities with boldstrategies is more significant than ever. Just don’t expect suchfast footwork and zany departures to emerge from green eye-shade analysts promoting just-the-hard-facts-maam, system-atic planning schemes.

R.I.P. strategic planning as we knew it and tried to love it.And thank you, Henry. Now can I please get some sleep?

Dubai 28 February 1994

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