Business Strategy in Global Environment Assignment

Business Strategy in Global Environment - Assignment Example The use of principles that simplify, reduce, and prescribe is an enduring feature of writings on business strategy. The writings of von Clausewitz and de Jomini outline a continuum between descriptive and prescriptive approaches to strategy. The Canadian management scholar Henry Mintzberg uses this distinction in Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through the Wilds of Strategic Management (1998), written with Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel. 10. The configuration school, which views strategy as a process of transforming the organisation -- it describes the relative stability of strategy, interrupted by occasional and dramatic leaps to new ones. "Mintzberg and his colleagues classify the voluminous writings on management strategy into 10 different "schools." The first three of these, in order of their emergence, include the design school (mainly associated with Professor Ken Andrews and the Harvard Business School), the planning school, and the position school (of which Harvard's Michael Porter is the best-known exponent). These schools are analytical and prescriptive. For example, H. Igor Ansoff's Corporate Strategy: An Analytic Approach to Business Policy for Growth and Expansion (1965), the classic planning text, is full of complex flow diagrams. For those with the planning mind-set, strategy is formulated through a controlled, conscious, explicit process conducted by the CEO (and a group of planners) in a top-down, formal fashion and emerges fully formed from this process ready for implementation. " (David K. Hurst) However, this classic planning approach to strategy suffered a deathblow in the 1970s when