ABSTRACT
Henry Mintzberg is best known as one of the world’s leading writers on strategy. Deliberately controversial, he has cast doubt on many of the more mechanistic approaches to strategy, and to management generally, which have been fashionable in Western academia and business over recent decades. To Mintzberg, strategy, and indeed much of management, is ad hoc and instinctive rather than structured and planned. His approach favours simplicity over complexity and common sense over rigid principles. Yet unlike other controversialists such as Tom Peters, Mintzberg does not recommend radical change or revolution: whereas Peters urges chaos and deliberate flux, Mintzberg urges creativity and pattern-making. His most famous concept is perhaps the idea of ‘emergent strategy’, strategy making which is always ongoing as a half-deliberate, halfsubconscious process, which shapes itself to changing needs and environments.
