The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning: Reconceiving Roles for Planning, Plans, Planners - Rilegato

Mintzberg, Henry

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0029216052 ISBN 13: 9780029216057

Casa editrice: Free Pr, 1994

Riassunto

A history of strategic planning reviews the pitfalls of planning, showing how it can destroy commitment, discourage change, and breed a political atmosphere and arguing that managers must rethink the process.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Henry Mintzberg is a visiting professor at INSEAD in France and a two-time winner of the prestigious McKinsey Award for the best Harvard Business Review article. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada -- the first fellow elected from a management faculty -- he is the author of several seminal books including Mintzberg on Management (Free Press, 1989).

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Chapter 1: Planning and Strategy

What is the relationship between planning and strategy? Is strategy making simply a process of planning, as the proponents of planning have so vigorously insisted? Or, at the other extreme, is strategic planning simply another oxymoron, like progressive conservative or jumbo shrimp (or civil engineer?). In other words, should strategy always be planned, never be planned, or sometimes be planned? Or should it relate to planning in some other way?

Barely anything written about planning or strategy provides considered answers to these questions. This book seeks to do so. We begin in this chapter by addressing some other basic questions. First we ask, "What is planning anyway?" After considering a variety of popular answers, we narrow them down to a definition of our own. Next we ask, "Why plan?" and provide the answers according to planners. (Our own answers come later.) Finally we ask, "And what is strategy?" and answer in a way that is opposite to planning by insisting on the need for several definitions. Then, after considering briefly planning, plans, and planners, we conclude this opening chapter with the plan for the rest of the book.

What Is Planning Anyway?

This may seem like a strange question to ask as the twentieth century draws to a close, given the long popularity of planning, especially (ironically) in both Corporate America and Communist Europe. Largely a budget exercise in the America of the 1950s, it began to spread quickly, having become firmly installed in most large corporations by the mid-1960s (Gilmore, 1970:16; Chamberlain, 1968:151). At that point the notion of strategic planning took hold, to become within a decade a virtual obsession among American corporations (and in American government, in the form of the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System, or PPBS).

In fact, however, the concept dates much farther back. There is even a reference to a "Director of Strategic Planning" in Sun Tzu's The Art of War (1971:146), originally written about 2,400 years ago (although a Chinese student of mine considers this title too loose a translation from the Chinese). But there is no doubt about the translation of Henri Fayol's work. Writing of his experiences as a French mining chief executive in the last century, he noted the existence of "ten-yearly forecasts...revised every five years" (1949:47). Despite all this attention, the fact remains that the question, "What is planning anyway?", has never been properly answered -- indeed, seldom seriously addressed -- in planning's own literature.

In 1967, in what remains one of the few carefully reasoned articles on the subject, Loasby wrote that "the word 'planning' is currently used in so many and various senses that it is in some danger of degenerating into an emotive noise" (1967:300). At about the same time, one of the more impressive assemblages of planning people took place at Bellagio, Italy, (Jantsch, 1969) under the auspices of the OECD. Jay Forrester's "reflection" on the conference included the comment that "efforts to define the terms [planning and long-range forecasting] failed" (1969a:503). They have failed ever since.

Aaron Wildavsky, a political scientist well-known for his criticisms of planning, concluded that in trying to be everything, planning became nothing:

Planning protrudes in so many directions, the planner can no longer discern its shape. He may be economist, political scientist, sociologist, architect or scientist. Yet the essence of his calling-planning -- escapes him. He finds it everywhere in general and nowhere in particular. Why is planning so elusive? (1973:127)

"Planning" may be so elusive because its proponents have been more concerned with promoting vague ideals than achieving viable positions, more concerned with what planning might be than what it actually became. As a result, planning has lacked a clear definition of its own place in organizations and in the state. Yet it is our belief that planning has, nevertheless, carved out a viable niche for itself, through its own successes and failures. The need, therefore, is not to create a place for planning so much as to recognize the place it already does occupy.

This book seeks to describe that place with regard to strategy-in effect, to develop an operational definition of planning in the context of strategy making. But we do not begin with the assumption that planning is whatever people called planners happen to do, or that planning is any process that generates formal plans. People called planners can sometimes do strange things, just as strategies can sometimes result from strange processes. We need to delineate the word carefully if it is not to be eventually dropped from the management literature as hopelessly contaminated. We begin here by considering formal definitions of planning; the rest of this book is about the operational definition.

To some people (1) planning is future thinking, simply taking the future into account. "Planning denotes thinking about the future," wrote Bolan (1974:15). Or in the more poetic words of Sawyer, "Planning is action laid out in advance" (1983:1).

The problem with this definition is that it cannot be bounded. What organizational activity, no matter how short-term or reactive, does not take the future into account? Newman acknowledged the problem back in 1951 when he quoted Dennison that "Almost all work, in order to be done at all, must be planned, at the least informally and a few minutes ahead" (1951:56). By this definition, planning includes ordering a sandwich for lunch as much as establishing a division to flood the market with sandwiches. In fact, Fayol understood this breadth of the term back in 1916 when he wrote that:

The maxim, "managing means looking ahead," gives some idea of the importance attached to planning in the business world, and it is true that if foresight is not the whole of management at least it is an essential part of it. (1949:43, published in French in 1916)

But if this is true if, as Dror put it more baldly, "planning, in a word, is management" (1971:105) -- why bother to use the word "planning" when "management" works just fine?

To others, (2) planning is controlling the future, not just thinking about it but acting on it, or as Weick (1979) is fond of saying, enacting it. "Planning is the design of a desired future and of effective ways of bringing it about," Ackoff wrote (1970:1). Others expressed the same thought when they defined the purpose of planning as "to create controlled change in the environment" (Ozbekhan, 1969:152), or, more pointedly, "the design of social systems" (Forrester, 1969b:237). In this regard, John Kenneth Galbraith argued in his book, The New Industrial State, that big business engages in planning to "replace the market," to "exercise control over what is sold...[and] what is supplied" (1967:24).

But this second definition of planning, really just the other side of the coin from the first, suffers from the same problem of excessive breadth. By associating planning with free will, it becomes synonymous again with popular uses of the word management and so loses distinctive meaning.

Since practically all actions with future consequences are planned actions, planning is everything, and nonplanning can hardly be said to exist. Nonplanning only exists when people have no objectives, when their actions are random and not goal-directed. If everybody plans (well, almost) it is not possible to distinguish planned from unplanned actions. (Wildavsky, 1973:130)

Schumacher (1974) provides some conceptual help here. By distinguishing the past from the future, acts from events, and certainty from uncertainty, eight possible cases are constructed:

1. act-past-certain

2. act-future-certain

3. act-past-uncertain

4. act-future-uncertain

5. event-past-certain

6. event-future-certain

7. event-past-uncertain

8. event-future-uncertain (188-189)

This approach is used to clarify such words as "plan," "forecast," and "estimate," and we can use it here to help position planning. The first two definitions in the list appear to place planning in cases 2 and 4 -- how to act in the future, whether certain or uncertain, or how to make it certain by enacting it. Anything to do with events -- things that "simply happen" -- is outside of the realm of planning: "to apply the word 'planning' to matters outside the planner's control is absurd," although that can be a part ...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Free Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0029216052
• ISBN 13: 9780029216057
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 458