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Introduction
Mintzberg's contribution to management and strategy, and his influence on generations of researchers in these fields, is immense. His journey is rich and enriching and his ideas permeate management and strategy thinking in explicit as well as implicit ways. One of his most influential pieces is the definition of strategy in five Ps (Mintzberg, 1987a). That article builds on his earlier work and is elaborated further in his subsequent work.
Mintzberg is a contrarian thinker (Mintzberg, 2010). One may venture to say that he tends to push too hard in the opposite direction of the dominant views of the day to settle for a more balanced view. His concluding thought on the value of a model he proposes demonstrates this tendency: “This grass-roots model of strategy formation is false, as anyone who seeks to test it in a broader context will quickly find out. But it is no more false than the widely accepted conventional model — the ‘deliberate’ (or ‘hothouse’) view of strategy formulation — which no one has bothered to test. A viable theory of strategy making must encompass both models” (Mintzberg and McHugh, 1985, p. 196). As this quote reveals, he does not believe in the validity of the model he proposes and admits that it is false. The point he makes is to show the inadequacy of the prevailing model and to drive toward a more integrative model, one that combines the two views. But because he is not making such confessions in every radical idea he promotes, many of them are accepted passively and, as a result, their influence is not scrutinized. He seems to have swung the metaphorical pendulum too far. This approach succeeded in its time, when there was too much emphasis on elaborate and rigid planning. Now, few would think of strategy as a detailed long-term plan, and majority would take flexibility, learning, creativity and responsiveness as important characteristics of good strategies.
This paper revisits the ideas of Mintzberg in his “five Ps for strategy” (Mintzberg, 1987a) and offers alternative views that get the metaphorical pendulum to swing around the middle. The impact of these ideas continues not only in some of Mintzberg and colleagues’ subsequent work but also on research programs of many others for...