In 1994, Henry Mintzberg’s book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, was published. In this scathing yet scholarly work, Mintzberg, the former president of the Strategic Management Society, tore into both the theory and practice of strategic planning—in the form it had taken especially during the 1970s. The iconoclastic management writer suggested that this kind of approach could more accurately be labeled “strategic programming,” since it was more about management control than strategy. Strategic programming applied a highly structured and rigid process to planning, often in an excessively formalized manner. Not only was this practice poorly named, Mintzberg asserted that planning and strategy making are mutually exclusive activities.
Strategic planning has failed, according to Mintzberg, because it is incompatible with strategic thinking. Planning is concerned with analysis—the decomposition of a goal into steps, formalizing those steps, and ensuring the organization is aligned with them. Strategic thinking, in contrast, is concerned with synthesis and revolves around intuition and creativity. In a later book, Strategy Safari (with Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel), Mintzberg put his 1994 views into context when he presented his critique as part of chapter 3’s discussion of the Planning School, which sees strategy as a formal process. Here, Mintzberg explained three basic fallacies of strategic planning-as-programming, as well as its “seven deadly sins.”
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