Mintzberg Crafting Strategy

Mintzberg tries to argue in his article, that a strategy that is brought about by crafting, meaning a process that is done in long term, will give better results than just sitting down and figuring out the dos and don’ts of entering or progressing in a certain businesses or a certain field at a specific time. He argues that it is better to craft a strategy than just planning it out at a particular day, in a room with fellow executives and officials. Crafting is not entirely left to the executives and the top officials only. It also includes the staff in the lower ranks such as the salespeople, the men in the field and so on.

The article offers more of the emergent than the prescriptive approach to strategy. As Mintzberg puts it, emergent strategy is also known as the process strategy. The writer tries to put across that strategy is brought forth with a process; it will work much better a play a big role in improving the company/firm than just having an instant step by step, set rules to follow kind of approach. This is because when a strategy is crafted, it is done out of experience taking into consideration the past and the future of events and the company in general.

However, as most of the things talk about are true and make a lot of sense, it is quite hard to come up with plans or strategies as problems arise. It is important that the officials in a business or organization be able to sit down and analyze some of the problems that arise more often than not. There is nothing wrong with planning a strategy. It might as well work as effective as crafting it.

As mentioned earlier, crafting is a process, and so it might take time especially if it will involve a board of officials of an organization. Let us take an example and have a major official, maybe an executive leave the organization. What will happen next, do we start from scratch, what happens if they have a whole different idea and they do not agree with what the other officials had come up with earlier, does that mean that they start a fresh? This is a situation that could arise and these are some of the inconveniences that would be brought about by this process.

If we look at the school of thought this article belongs to according Whittington, it would be the evolutionary approach of strategy. The business that adopts best to the environment and stays ahead of the competition will be able to survive the highly competitive market. One of the main aims of developing strategies is to develop ways of maximizing profits and thus staying ahead of the completion. This is why the writer is telling us that crafting strategies will be better and help more towards achieving this goal than just planning them.

The writer continues and gives us an example of Sam Steinberg who stayed ahead of his competition by spending Saturday mornings visiting his stores thus getting the chance to know his customers, the merchandise, their costs, how they were sold thus giving