Tracking Strategies

Description

There is a great deal of practice, discussion, and publication about strategy, but the surprisingly little investigation of the processes by which strategies actually form in organizations. This book reports the results of Henry Mintzberg’s investigation about this that he has conducted over several decades.

Defining realized strategy – the strategy an organization has actually pursued – as a pattern in a stream of actions, this investigation was able to track strategies in organizations over long periods of time, usually three or four decades, and in one case, a century and a half. This meant the patterns by which strategies form and change in organizations, the interplay of ‘deliberate’ with ’emergent’ strategies, and the relationship between leadership, organization, and environment in the strategy formation process, could be revealed.