In one of the last weeks posts I expressed the wish to start a sort of article series on the different meanings of »strategy« in the business and IT world. The wish stems out of the experience that in most articles and views the whole discipline is solely centered around the planning and designing of deliberate strategy. A view which, in my opinion,  is much to limited to effectivley deal with todays requirements and environmental conditions. What we need is a »fresh look«, a spark to refresh our views on strategy and adapt it to current realities.

Todays post provides the first of those facets by an adaptation of Henry Mintzbergs classic article »5 P’s For Strategy«. In his article Mintzberg offers five perspectives on strategy:

• Plan
• Ploy
• Pattern
• Position
• Perspective

You can find a link to the original article at the end of this post. We’ll now have a quick glance on each one.

Plan:

This look on strategy is one of the most common and classic ones. Here strategy resembles some sort of consciously intended course of action. It materializes in a plan. A set of guidelines to deal with a situation.  It is the military picture of the strategist on the hill deploying his resources and commanding his troops.

Ploy:

As a special form of a plan the »ploy« is a maneuver to outwit an opponent or competitor. In the military this could be a false attack, in the business world a placed (and misleading) anouncement to deceive the direct competitors.

Pattern:

By applying this perspective the outcomes of the formerly planned enters the strategic world. A »pattern« is related to a stream of actions and their outcomes. It therefore describes a consistency in the behavior of an organization. For qualifying as a pattern it doesn’t matter if the realized behavior was intended (planned) or not. Outsiders observe a pattern in the behavior of an entity and infer a strategy. In hindsight most courses of action seem clear and obvious. The difficulty lies in knowing beforehand how things will develop. In reality most outcomes differ substantially from the ones formerly predicted or planned. As a result some people think the realization of deliberate strategy is almost impossible to achieve. This school of thought acknowledges this and enables firms compete in complex environments by recognizing patterns and learning from the past.

Position:

Here strategy means the positioning of your firm in its environment.  The name most people associate with this school of thought is the one of Michael Porter. His model of the five forces in industry environments help to analyze the situation at hand and gives guidelines to deal with specific situation in form of generic strategies. In this respect strategy becomes the mediating entity between organization and environment. The objective is to find a calm spot (a position) between the forces where sustainable advantage can be realized.

Perspective:

While the positioning school looks at the outside on the environent the firm competes in »perpective« looks at the inside of an organization. It tries to describe the »ingrained way« a firm perceives the world. In this respect strategy is to the organization what personality is to an individual. There are aggressive firms and calm ones. There are the creative and the conservative. The personality of a firm determines its actions and hence its strategy. So strategy becomes the actions resulting out of the collective mind of an organization.

So much for the first set of perspectives on what resembles the strategy grail. What becomes immediately clear is that there can be more to strategy than Analyze, Plan, Act. It emphasizes a truth too oft denied: That the most expensive strategic plans have almost nothing to do with what actually happens.

Time to have a new look on strategy.

Adapted from Henry Mintzbergs »5 P’s For Strategy«.