香蕉视频

"There are two people, and only two," writes Professor Karl Moore professor at the Desautels Faculty, 香蕉视频 in Montreal in Forbes, "whose ideas must be taught to every MBA in the world: Michael Porter and Henry Mintzberg... You can contrast their two views as Porter's taking a more deliberate strategy approach while Mintzberg's emphasize emergent strategy... Porter's ideas are still relevant.. But they are getting a bit long in the tooth for today's different world.聽Henry's emergent strategy ideas simply seem to be more relevant to the world we live in today."

In the Special Issue of the journal, Strategy & Leadership, on (2011, Vol 39, No. 2), Mintzberg speaks with S&L founder Robert Allio about management, leadership, innovation and emergent strategy. Here are some excerpts from the conversation:

Mintzberg is crystal clear on the mythical distinction between leadership and management:

Mintzberg: The notion that one can be a leader and not a manager, originally postulated by Harvard Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik, is wrong. An executive cannot lead without managing. If they're not coupled, the organization becomes dysfunctional....

S&L: What do you see as the utility of formal strategic planning, as compared with an opportunistic approach, the emergent strategy model?

Mintzberg: I prefer a learning approach, as compared to a planning approach, to strategy. You cannot formalize the process of creating strategy - you can only formalize the implementation of strategy through budgets, programs, and so forth.

Take the case of IKEA - the enormously successful Swedish furniture company. Their business model comprised two critical elements: offer furniture unassembled, and give customers access to the warehouse...

S&L: IKEA has certainly excelled. Do we know the genesis of their strategy?

Mintzberg: Yes. One of the workers, frustrated in trying to get a table in his car decided to take the legs off. Insight number one - all customers have the same challenge. And IKEA began selling unassembled merchandize. Insight number two: when a large new store in Stockholm became inundated with customers, staff began to allow customers to retrieve product from the warehouse - the go get-the-stuff-yourself model. Opportunism? I call it learning....

S&L: What's the metric for the effectiveness of your approach?

Mintzberg: One can't measure learning, so the bottom line is impossible to quantify. As a result, we use surrogate measures, such as repeat business. Customer loyalty is very high...

S&L: So businesses need a culture that enables that kind of behavior, one based on collaboration and communication. In the well-managed corporation, who's responsible for this learning process? Doesn't the CEO have a role in all of this?

Mintzberg: Everyone is responsible. Everyone is learning at all levels, and management is listening. Middle managers are important, although they do need the support of senior management. The problem with the concept of leadership is that it implies everyone else is a follower. But we don't need more followers. We need a world of community-ship in which employees have a sense of belonging, and a willingness to work hard for it...

S&L: What overall advice can you offer executives managing in today's turbulent environment?

Mintzberg: The current crisis is not simply a banking or financial sector crisis, it is a management crisis. America's legendary sense of enterprise - embodied in the energy and resourcefulness of its people, has been the key to its economic miracle. The dismal state to which the American economy has now fallen can be attributed significantly to the steady deterioration of many of its large enterprises, which has undermined the country's very sense of enterprise. Publicly-traded corporations are dreadfully badly managed.

Paul Krugman, the economic columnist for the New York Times and other editorializers keep calling for economic solutions - but it's not an economic problem, it's a management problem that cannot be fixed with modifications to fiscal and monetary policy. But no one wants to hear that message...

Read full article: , April 8, 2011