in short, strategy is not about what success is, but about how to succeed.
mintzberg believes that strategy has multiple definitions: "strategy is planning, strategy is strategy, strategy is mode, strategy is positioning, and strategy is perspective".
Liu Run thinks: strategy is medicine, and medicine has three poisons.
Learning strategies must distinguish between the logic of "medicine" and the logic of "medicine". It is impossible for a person to practice medicine according to Compendium of Materia Medica, and the logic of medicine is "suit the right medicine".
The same symptoms don't mean the same symptoms, so don't use drugs blindly, it's a three-point poison.
"High-performance enterprises demonstrate the ability to integrate various competition criteria in strategic decision-making, and they also have these characteristics: planning and gradualism, command and participation, control and authorization, foresight and details. "
mintzberg's Strategic Course is actually a medication guide. What are these drugs? He divided strategy into ten schools, namely, design school, planning school, orientation school, entrepreneur school, cognition school, learning school, power school, culture school, environment school and structure school.
conceive and ponder the awareness. Get a basic match between internal strengths and weaknesses and external threats and opportunities. Executives make clear, simple, easy to understand and unique strategies after careful consideration, so that everyone can implement the strategies.
strategy formulation is a controlled ideological process, that is, it is not a procedural analysis process, nor is it developed intuitively.
Hou Yi, founder of Boxma Xiansheng: Every great business comes from top-level design, which is a typical design school's thinking.
The most commonly used model of design school is SWOT, followed by PEST, what to plan in five years.
Some state-owned enterprises are keen on making five-year plans. "The only purpose of our planning is to end the planning".
One of the most frequently asked questions by design consultants is: Can you summarize your company's strategy in less than 35 words? This is also a typical design school thinking.
Summarize the characteristics of the design school:
1. The company has only one strategist, that is, CEO
2. Once the strategy is formulated, the next step is to implement it.
3. The design school opposes the "gradual" view and the "emergent" strategy.
the planning school has an important assumption: the process of strategy formulation should not only be well thought out, but also be standardized, which can be decomposed into clear steps. Each step can be described in the form of a checklist, and various technologies, especially goals, budgets, procedures and operational plans, are used as auxiliary means.
This means that the general planner takes the place of senior executives and becomes the main role in the strategy formulation process.
Every well-known strategic consulting company has its own "strategic planning" model.
different strategic planning models have a common feature: complexity.
major group companies have set up "Group Strategy Department &; General staff &; Research institute ",in fact, these strategic departments can't formulate strategies, they just undertake a link of strategy formulation.
the process of strategy includes at least three parts: information collection and analysis, proposal, implementation and supervision. In fact, these people can't and shouldn't mention it. This should be the responsibility of the CEO.
A good planning process should be a combination of left-handed and right-handed.
Summarize the characteristics of the planning school:
1. Strategies should be formulated by well-educated planners and approved by the CEO;
2. What really produces strategy is a controllable and conscious formal planning process;
3. The strategy is refined into objectives, budgets, procedures and various business plans.
this school believes that after a formal analysis of the industry situation and careful screening, the strategy can be simplified to a general positioning. So planners become analysts. The visiting school put forward a wide range of theories, including strategic groups, value chain analysis, game theory and other viewpoints, but they all have the same characteristics of paying attention to analysis.
According to the logic of medicine, the positioning school should have thousands of prescriptions, because everyone's symptoms are different, but the positioning school divided the prescription into three drawers. The doctor's main task is to analyze which drawer prescription your symptoms are more suitable for.
The orientation school has a long history, and reached the climax respectively:
First, the military motto style. For example, in Sun Tzu's Art of War, "ten are surrounded, five are attacked, and times are divided; The enemy can fight it, the few can escape it, and if not, they can avoid it.
the second is to look for consulting requirements. Boston matrix
The third is the development of empirical proposition: Porter's competitive analysis model.
Summarize the characteristics of the positioning school:
1. The CEO is the main strategist, and the designer is the analyst and planner
2. Limited choices are simple but may be one-sided;
3. Focusing on competition limits the vision and also restricts the creativity of the strategy.
The design school, the planning school and the orientation school emphasize deliberation and analysis, but they have the same problem, that is, they can't cope with changes.
The view of the entrepreneurial school is that the situation is changing so fast, how can you make a feasible plan? You may not know where to go, and how can you design a specific path?
knowing where to go is very important, but the specific path is not so important.
Therefore, not every enterprise needs vision, mission and values, but only one of the top ten schools.
Alibaba: Let there be no hard business in the world;
Microsoft: Let everyone have a computer on their desktop;
Xiaomi: Let everyone enjoy the fun of science and technology.
Like the design school, it emphasizes the importance of leadership in the process of strategic formulation; However, unlike the design school, the entrepreneur school regards the formation of strategy as a process dominated by the intuition of leaders, which is completely opposite to the planning school. So strategy has changed from precise design, planning and positioning to vague willingness or broad view, which can only be presented through metaphor in a sense.
However, if enterprise leaders vigorously promote the implementation process of their established vision, the essential differences between the entrepreneurial school and the first three normative schools will begin to fade.
Because the school of entrepreneurship emphasizes the role of entrepreneurs more, it also requires entrepreneurs more.
Such entrepreneurs are generally a "slightly mad" person to lead people to realize their vision.
what is mild mania? It is defined in medicine in this way.
1. It is inspiring and convincing, and has the ability to "distort the reality field".
2. Full of energy and little sleep;
3. Put your energy into your ambition
4. And believe that this will change the world.
The first four schools have the same problem. Strategies can be well thought out, planned and analyzed, and enterprises can also build a vision, but only if you know enough. If your cognition is not in place, how can you make a suitable strategic plan, so improve your cognition first.
people's cognition is biased. Kahneman's prospect theory shows that it is easy to be biased when studying people's cognition, and it is ok if one's cognition is always biased or fallacious. For example, "addicted to small probability events" and so on.
strategy is constructed subjectively. Another new branch of this school adopts a more subjective explanatory or constructivist view to look at the strategic process: human cognitive process, that is, creatively explaining the process and constructing the strategy. Cognition is not only a process of objectively reflecting reality, but also a process of subjective explanation, which constructs a strategic process.
Cognitive psychology tells us that the world you see is the world you perceive.
strategy is a satisfactory decision under incomplete information. Herbert Simon's "limited decision theory" won the Nobel Prize in Economics and Business.
Socrates' ear-picking theory is a case of satisfactory decision-making. According to the ear-picking theory, the most suitable marriage age for girls is around 27 if the best childbearing age is 3.
To sum up the viewpoints of the cognitive school:
1. Compared with the first four schools, the cognitive school is subjective;
2. Strategy formation is a cognitive process that occurs in the strategists' thoughts;
3. Strategy is to make decisions according to the cognitive level in the case of insufficient information.
since the strategy is so complicated, what should the strategist do? The school of learning gave an answer: learning.
this school believes that strategy is naturally generated when individuals or (more often) groups begin to study a certain situation and the ability of organizations to cope with it. In the end, the strategy will converge into an effective mode of action.
"Change is no longer managed, but managed through change". -Lapile.
Although leaders have to learn, and sometimes they are the main learners, it is usually the whole group that is learning: there are many potential strategists in most organizations.
Otherwise, this conversation will happen:
Leader: If only you idiots could understand my perfect strategy;
executor: since you are so smart, why do you plan a strategy that fools like us can implement well?
The learning school believes that any actor who has the ability and resources to learn can create a strategic prototype. Some prototypes have been promoted to the whole organization or senior managers after being supported by managers, and have been developed. Such a successful strategic prototype will gather the "stream" of experience into the "sea" of mode, and finally form an emerging strategy.
the main responsibility of a leader is not to foresee the strategy, but to identify it.
One of the most famous experiments of supporting learning school is the experiment of "bees and flies". When important strategies are repositioned, they are rarely carried out through formal planning, and in fact, they are often not even from top managers. On the contrary, it comes from small actions and decisions made by different people (sometimes by accident and luck, not deliberately pursuing the effect). After long-term accumulation, these small changes will lead to major changes in the strategic direction.
in other words, anyone with insight in the organization can drive the strategic process.
There are many such emergent phenomena in nature, such as fish schools and geese. Because of their popularization of learning simple planning, they have achieved far more than the sum of individuals who are dispersed.
To sum up, the characteristics of the learning school are:
1. The key is not the budget strategy, but the identification strategy;
2. Constantly reflect, pull out harmful seeds, and let good seeds emerge, multiply and spread.
3. It's better to be full of vitality in a mess than to be dead in an orderly way.
what you said seems reasonable, but do you consider your competitors? A supplier? Customers? They don't understand what needs they have, and they don't support them. No matter how good you think, it's no use.
You know about sex politics. Do they agree with it and support it? What should they do if they confront you? Is your strategy even more effective?
Micro-power holds that the strategic development within an organization is political, and in this process, the roles with different powers negotiate, talk and confront each other.
Macro-power focuses on the application of power by organizations, thinking that organizations as an entity will use their own power to influence other parties and their partners in alliances, joint ventures and other network relationships, so as to discuss various "collective" strategies that are beneficial to their own interests.
to give a few examples: banks install ATM machines together; Joint venture: exchange market for technology; Strategic alliance; Strategic outsourcing resulted in Made in China.
To sum up the characteristics of the power school:
1. The strategy is formed by the game of relevant participants;
2. Micro power regards strategy as a political game;
3. Macro-power regards strategy as a full-scale alliance.
put power in front of a mirror, and what is reflected in the mirror is culture. Cultural school believes that strategy formulation is a process rooted in culture and influenced by social and cultural driving forces.
"Bad culture will eat strategy as a snack"
"No, this sentence is not entirely correct. In fact, the strategy is breakfast, the technology is lunch, the product is dinner, and the culture will eat everything behind. "
For example, why is Amoeba not well implemented? Because it is rooted in the Japanese culture of "respecting heaven and loving people"; Why does OKR play well in America? Because of the free and open (social) culture. Not checking is not the main reason, but culture is.
To sum up the characteristics of the cultural school:
1. Enterprises are essentially regarded as the mutual competition of resource bundles;
2. Culture is a tool for compiling these resources;
3. An organizational culture that cannot be copied and is difficult to understand is precisely the protector of the strategic advantage of the organization.
natural selection, survival of the fittest, those who stay must adapt to this environment, and those who don't adapt have long been eliminated.
When Agopa comes, what inspired Darwin to discover the theory of evolution must be something special that adapts to environmental changes. As for which one will definitely stay and which one will be eliminated, I don't know, the leader can only sow beans and become soldiers, so let them evolve separately.
Haier: One person and one person, small and micro enterprises;
Handu Yishe: group system
Finnicz: fission entrepreneurship.
Summarize the characteristics of environmental school:
1. Environment is usually regarded as an external "fuzzy" force;
2. Darwin: variation-choice-reservation
3. Strategic choice is limited by environment.
structural school is more academic and descriptive. It regards organization as a kind of structure-a compact aggregate that integrates various characteristics and actions, and at the same time integrates the opinions of other schools, that is, each structure actually has its own position.
for example, mechanical organizations often use the planning school's strategy formulation method under relatively stable conditions, while more dynamic organizations such as start-ups often use the entrepreneur school's strategy formulation method.
if we consider the change of state, we must describe the change of organization as a major transformation process-jumping from one state to another.
Many models we have studied are actually structural schools.
such as product life cycle model and enterprise life cycle model.
Summarize the characteristics of structural school:
1. In a specific period, adopt a special structure, match the special environment, produce a special behavior, and form a special strategy
2. The stable period is interrupted by the process of change and turns to a leap of another structure.
3. planning strategy+emergency strategy. (Deliberate strategy+emergency change strategy, combined)
Finally, I want to end this combing with the story of a blind man touching an elephant.
Six eager Indians went to see elephants together. They are all blind, and they all satisfy their desire to see things through touch. The first blind man who approached the elephant happened to bump into the elephant's broad and strong body drive and immediately shouted, "God, the elephant is like a wall." The second blind man, touching the ivory, shouted, "Wow, what did we meet?" The circle is slippery and sharp! I see, obviously, an elephant is like a spear! " sequence