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There are two people, and only two, whose ideas must be taught to every MBA 

in the world: Michael Porter and Henry Mintzberg. This was true morethan 25 years ago, when I did my MBA at USC. These are two academics who

have had real impact for a long time. Part of their success, beyond having big

relevant ideas, is due to their clear and concise writing skills (There is certainly 

a lesson in there for many of us business school academics).

Both ha ve been very influential in the study of strategy, an area of 

considerable interest to many Forbes readers. You can contrast their two

 views as Porter’s taking a more deliberate strategy approach while Mintzberg’s

emphasize emergent strategy. Both are still taught, in fact, I taught Porter’s 3

Generic Strategies and his 5 Forces Model not two weeks ago in an

undergraduate strategy course at McGill. Which is most useful today?

The world of deliberate strategy is one that I remember well from my days as a

corporate manager at IBM and then as an executive teacher at Oxford and

LBS. It was a world of strategy planning weekends at posh hotels in the

English countryside, where we sat in rooms discussing the 5 Forces in our

particular industry and what would we change in the model if we had a fairy’s

magic wand. The output was 3 ring binders in North America and 2 ring

 binders in Europe. This worked well in its day, back in the 80s and part of the

90s, wonderful times now looking back on it, when the past was quite helpful

in predicting the future. However, the nature of the world today no longer

lends itself, by in large, to this type of strategy.

Emergent strategy is the view that strategy emerges over time as intentions

collide with and accommodate a changing reality. Emergent strategy is a set of 

actions, or behavior, consistent over time, “a realized pattern [that] was not

expressly intended” in the original planning of strategy. Emergent strategy 

implies that an organization is learning what works in practice. Given today’s

 world, I think emergent strategy is on the upswing. Here’s why.

But first, in the interest of transparency, I have worked closely with Henry co-

directing and co-teaching on Leadership Programs at McGill, where we are

 both on the faculty, for more than a decade. In fact, many times, I have

presented key parts of Porter’s ideas on strategy for a couple of hours and

 

LEADERSHIP  |  3/28/2011 @ 8:14AM | 43,667 views

Porter or Mintzberg: Whose View of Strategy Is the MostRelevant Today?

Karl Moore, Contributor

I write about how leadership must be rethought

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then Henry presents his ideas as a contrast to Michael’s. We started doing

this tag team effort about 11 years ago and it has become increasingly easy for

Henry to shoot me down in the last few years. And the executives in the class

agree with Henry.

It seems the relatively stable world of (at least part of) my corporate career has

gone the way of the dodo. At times, it seems the world‘s gone nuts. Let me

count the ways: Japan, the PIGS, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, SARS, the

financial collapse of 2008 and 2009, the BP oil spill, and many more

examples. As one writer put in it this weekend’s Sunday New York Times,“For a moment, all the swans seemed black.” However, as my friend Dick 

Evans, ex-CEO of Alcan, pointed out that my memory was being a bit

selective, as it was not only recently that stability seems to have gone out the

 window. He reminded me of the time he was stationed “in Africa experiencing

3 coups – and then back in the USA in the midst of the junk bond raiders, a

 wrenching manufacturing recession and the fall of the Iron Curtain – not to

mention personally experiencing the Loma Prieta earthquake. All of these

seemed pretty “black swanish” to me at the time!” Fair point, nevertheless, it

seems that strategy has shifted in the last decade to where the planning school

no longer has the street cred it once had. It is precisely because we cannot, try 

as we may, control the variables that factor into business decisions thatMintzberg’s emergent strategy is so useful.

Porter’s ideas are still relevant, my colleagues and I still teach them, so I still

 believe in them and when I talk to corporate CEOs they still use them as part

of their strategy planning thinking. But they are getting a bit long in the tooth

for today’s different world. Henry’s emergent strategy ideas simply seem to be

more relevant to the world we live in today – they reflect the fact that our

plans will fail. This is not to say that planning isn’t useful, but other than some

long term technology plans, the day of the 5 year and even 2 year plans has

faded and emergent strategy is the reality in most industries that I work with.

 You must be much more fleet of foot, strategic flexibility is what we are

looking for in most industries. The boundaries are more fluid now. For many,albeit not all, knowing what industry you are in is not as clear cut as it once

 was. This makes industry analysis less easy. The value chain is now shared

across firm boundaries and at times, in part, in common with competitors.

Though I think that Henry’s ideas have pulled ahead of Michael’s, I very 

much keep on an eye on Porter’s thinking. I interviewed him recently for a

 weekly videocast I do for the Globe and Mail , Canada’s National Newspaper,

 because his new ideas are very much current. Interestingly both Porter and

Mintzberg started to put a great deal of their attention on Health Care about

8-10 years ago. They approach the topic differently. Porter is in the U.S. and

Mintzberg in Canada, which have quite different health care systems, yet

 when I realized this it was clear signal to me that this is an area that I shouldpay attention to. The other thing Porter has been working on, Corporate

Social Responsibility, suggests a fairly fundamental change in how corporate

 American runs itself. Meanwhile, Henry is working on Rebalancing Society…

radical renewal beyond Smith and Marx.

So when it comes to Strategy I think Henry’s ideas are au courant. Yet when I

consider their most recent respective work I see that they are looking at two

not dissimilar topics, albeit in different ways. We are indeed fortunate that

these two outstanding minds are still at it when many others are retired. Still

two, too very much keep an eye on!

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This new Forbes.com column is called Rethinking Leadership. What I will do

one week is to feature video interviews with top business professors from the

 world’s leading business schools on their latest thinking, how they are

rethinking what we teach in B-schools. The other week I will write an on-line

column like this one. A key theme is to ruminate on how younger people,

 what I call the PostModern Generation, want to be worked with. A book I am

 working on is entitled: PostModern Management: Leading, Managing

 Working With Under 35s The Way They Want To Be Worked With. They 

don’t want to be lead or managed, those words are too strong for them, they 

 want to be worked with, more on that soon.

This article is available online at:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/karlmoore/2011/03/28/porter-or-mintzberg-whose-view-of-

strategy-is-the-most-relevant-today/