CHAPTER6

Strategy in Action

How is strategy created? Does good strategy really arrive centrally planned, fully formed, in a neatly packaged, ready-to-go form? Or is the process more haphazard, messier? Is it evolutionary? How does strategy actually get made? Such questions remain the subject of lively and perennial debate. Among the most persuasive and authoritative stokers of the debate over the last half century has been the Canadian academic Henry Mintzberg.

A professor of management at McGill University in Montreal, Mintzberg studied mechanical engineering at McGill in 1961 as well as completing a general arts degree in the evenings. He worked in industry in the operational research branch of Canadian Railways between 1961 and 1963. But the ...

Get Thinkers 50 Strategy: The Art and Science of Strategy Creation and Execution now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.