Henry Mintzberg

The Structuring of Organizations

This [reading] argues that […] spans of control, types of formalization and decentralization, planning systems, and matrix structures should not be picked and chosen independently, the way a shopper picks vegetables at the market or a diner a meal at a buffet table. Rather, these and other parameters of organizational design should logically configure into internally consistent groupings. Like most phenomena — atoms, ants, and stars — characteristics of organizations appear to fall into natural clusters, or configurations.

Structure in fives : designing effective organizations

1. Foundations of Organization Design. 2. Designing Individual Positions. 3. Designing the Superstructure. 4. Fleshing Out the Superstructure. 5. Untangling Decentralization. 6. Fitting Design to Situation. 7. Design as Configuration. 8. The Simple Structure. 9. The Machine Bureaucracy. 10. The Professional Bureaucracy. 11. The Divisionalized Form. 12. The Adhocracy. 13. Beyond Five. Bibliography. Index.

Strategy-Making in Three Modes:

The strategy-making process exists in three basic modes: the entrepreneurial mode, where bold decisions are taken by a powerful decision-maker; the adaptive mode, where a coalition of decision-makers reacts to environmental pressures with small, disjointed steps; and the planning mode, where analysts integrate strategic decisions into systematic plans.

The Strategy Concept I: Five Ps For Strategy

Strategy requires multiple definitions to fully appreciate its implications. Accordingly, this article proposes five definitions—strategy as plan, ploy, pattern, position, and perspective—and analyzes how these definitions interrelate.

Tracking Strategy in an Entrepreneurial Firm

This study tracks the strategies of a retail chain over 60 years of its history to show how that vague concept called strategy can be operationalized and to draw conclusions about strategy formatio...

Managing the care of health and the cure of disease--Part I: Differentiation.

The clinical methods used in health care and disease cure are easily understood. Yet when combined into institutions and broadened into social systems, the management of them becomes surprisingly convoluted. Part I of this article presents a framework to help understand how this happens.

Managing the care of health and the cure of disease--Part II: Integration.

The development of appropriate levels of integration in the system of health care and disease cure will require stronger collective cultures and enhanced communication among the key actors. Part II of this paper uses this line of argument to reframe four major issues in this system: coordination of acute cure and of community care, and collaboration in institutions and in the system at large.

Rethinking strategic planning part I: Pitfalls and fallacies

Abstract Planners have tended to blame the problems of so-called ‘strategic planning’ on a set of ‘pitfalls’—notably the lack of top management support and organizational climates not congenial to planning. But planning may well have discouraged the very support its proponents claim to need, and its itself may have generated climates uncongenial to effective strategy making. The real problems may, therefore, lie deeper than these pitfalls, in a set of what can be called ‘fallacies’, notably about the capabilities of predicting discontinuities, about being able to detach strategists from the subjects of their strategy making, and about being able to formalize the strategy making process in the first place. Part one of this two part article thus concludes that ‘strategic planning’ ia an oxymoron.

Rethinking Strategic Planning Part II: New Roles for Planners

Abstract Given the conclusions of Part I, what should be the roles of planning, plans, and planners with respect to strategy making? Around that process (which remains the responsibility of line management) rather than inside of it is the conclusion offered here. So called ‘strategic planning’ really amounts to strategic programming , designed to operationalize the strategy an organization already has, rather than to give it a strategy in the first place. Then plans likewise line up after strategy making, as media for communicating and devices for control. And planners, besides concerning themselves with such planning and plans, when they are necessary, have other important roles to play: as finders of emerging strategies, as analyst who feed important information often overlooked by line managers into the strategy process, and as catalysts who encourage strategic thinking and strategic acting , not strategic planning.

The Pitfalls of Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is based on a number of mistaken assumptions. One of these assumptions is that the external environment can be made predictable. But, in point of fact, the external environment is always unpredictable: turbulence is a constant. Accordingly, the popularity of planning rests in part on the illusion of control.