Strategic Management Assignment on Whittington and Mintzberg's Strategy

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Introduction “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu (1971) Strategy provides individuals and organizations with a direction over the long-term, by which advantages are gained in the changing environment; and through the arrangements of the right resources and capabilities the ultimate aim of fulfilling stakeholder expectations is accomplished (Johnson, Scholes and Whittington, 1998). Time and again theories have come into view regarding the phenomenon of organizational strategy. Henry Mintzberg, 1998, identified ten schools of thoughts where three of those were the prescriptive approaches (i.e. rational; which takes alternative factors into consideration); six were descriptive approaches (i.e. emergent or intuitive; which are based on past evidences); and the last school combined the attributes of other schools (Ginter, Swayne, Duncan, 2002). While Mintzberg identified a detailed classification of the approaches to strategy, Richard Whittington classified the approaches into a more comprehensible form of four categories in conjunction with two dimensions, including profit-maximizing outcome, and deliberate or emergent process (Barca, 2003). Simply put, these approaches or schools symbolize the process of developing strategy rather than the content of it (Barca, 2002). “The world is going too fast”, Phillip Hone, 1844 (Steiner, 2006). The volatility of business environment today ascended the debate among the necessity of planning a strategy or merely allowing the emergence of it. To comprehend such debate, it is imperative to understand the distinction between emergent and deliberate strategies. Organizations may intend to imply a strategy which becomes a deliberate strategy when it gets realized or implemented. But due to uncertain situations intended strategies could go unrealized; eventually leading to the execution

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