Strategy is an emergent process.

For proponents of the learning school, any attempt to reduce the complex world into clear positions and plans is futile. The world is far too vast and multifaceted to allow such reduction. Therefore strategy cannot be a formal planning process. Rather, strategies emerge as individuals and the organization learn about themselves and the situation around them, as well as their capability to respond to those situations. Thus, strategy is not a large plan full of delineated steps developed and assigned by senior management but a series of little actions and decisions made by everyone at every level of an organization.

Like the prescriptive schools, the entrepreneurial school emphasizes the need for information, both internal and external. But this information isn’t to be collected by the chief strategists, rather its circulated to all in the interest of pursuing the best ideas.

“Micromanaging isn’t a dangerous as macroleading.”

There’s a near consensus that micromanaging is gone. Whether you pull from empowerment advocates, motivational models or just plain common sense, individual contributors most often want to be given the right resources, told the objective, and be left alone to work. The exception of course being in the early stages of a new work assignment, when supervision and feedback are needed as part of training. Micromanaging can cause decreased in performance and maybe even increases in turnover.

But is macroleading even more dangerous?

Mintzberg defines Macroleading as when leaders get so focused on setting strategy and vision that they remove themselves from the front lines and eventually develop a vision for the organization so out of touch that the rest of the organization fails to buy in…or worse buys in but is incapable of taking any steps toward realization. Macroleadership sets a vision and hopes that performance toward the objective may occur. Yet, if no one knows where to go, then the leader’s efforts have been futile.

Perhaps Mintzberg is right. Though the temptation is to stay away and not micromanaging, perhaps leaders need to get involved on the front lines, understand what’s realistic, and then begin doing all the fancy stuff we associate with top-level leadership.

What do you think: micromanage or macrolead?

But there is far more to strategy than just announcing where an organization is headed. The authors of Strategy Safari use the analogy of a syringe to explain this misconception. Where leaders believe it is solely their responsibility to fill a syringe with deliberate strategy and then inject it into the followers. What causes this misconception? Another analogy. The authors liken understanding all element of strategy to blind men touching an elephant and trying to describe the whole creature. Each individual section is not the whole.

To that end, the authors seek to explore the ten common schools of strategy:

1. The Design School views strategy formation as a process of conception.
2. The Planning School views as a formal process, which follows a rigorous set of steps from analysis of the situation to the development and exploration of various alternative scenarios.
3. The Positioning School views strategy formation as an analytical process placing the business within the context of its industry.
4. The Entrepreneurial School views strategy formation as a visionary process, taking place solely within the mind of the leader.
5. The Cognitive School views strategy formation as a mental process, and analyzes how people perceive patterns and process information.
6. The Learning School views strategy formation as an emergent process of trial and error.
7. The Power School views strategy formation as a process of negotiation between power holders within the company.
8. The Cultural School views strategy formation as a collective process involving various groups and departments within the company.
9. The Environmental School views strategy formation as a reactive process, responding to the challenges imposed by the external environment.
10. The Configuration School views strategy formation as a process of transforming the organization from one type of decision-making structure into another.

The authors present the strengths and weaknesses of all ten schools, though they reveal and confess their favoritism toward the Learning School. Moreover, they assert the need to understand all ten schools. Just as the blind men feeling the elephant, no school of thought describes strategy in its entirety. Strategy Safari presents itself somewhere in between a textbook and a casual business book, enlightening yet entertaining to read. Overall, Strategy Safari is required reading for all strategic leaders.