Thank you for this. I've been on a journey to understand strategy & developed my own frame to link it to my experience as a finance professional. Linking great thoughts from Roger or Rumelt to commitment, resource allocation, budgeting etc gave me the link I really needed to take my own journey forward.
The link from strategy to planning & then breaking planning into different buckets makes it so obvious in hindsight after reading your work but very easy to miss. I've seen budgeting as last year plus a percentage with scenario analysis meaning only three scenarios with different assumptions on the numbers without changing the underlying model assumptions.
I took weeks to read through as I as digesting each section before moving to the next.
Thank you for the kind feedback, Anand! I’m glad my own journey can be of help to yours.
Yeah, I tend to be very analytical and uncomfortable with things that seem to make sense on their own but don’t quite fit together. The whole dynamic between strategy and planning has been a head scratcher across my entire career. Can’t say that’s the last way I’ll think about the theme, but it does feel like it converges a little bit more each time!
I’m going to publish a new one this Wednesday on why some strategies seem to follow the exact frameworks recommend by great thinkers like Roger Martin and Richard Rumelt, and yet become loose lists of initiatives instead of actual strategies. I think you’ll enjoy it!
Haven’t read Salazar but I spent a few hours on the corpus and interviews, so provisionally:
The good parts seem real. The death-of-strategic-planning polemic is exactly what’s needed. Two contributions I’d import: the critical coalition as a named social body for strategic conversation, and the hard choice as a coherence test that forces emergent pattern-recognition to culminate in irreversible commitment. Mintzberg describes pattern, Martin prescribes choice, Salazar joins them through paradigm-break commitment inside a disciplined body. Real move.
But from what I’ve read, this doesn’t close the gap. It looks like a sophisticated practitioner-refinement of Mintzberg’s Learning School. Death-of-planning is Mintzberg 1994. The three fallacies are Mintzberg’s three fallacies relabeled. Ladder of inference is Argyris verbatim. The synthesis is Salazar’s great move.
Thank you for this. I've been on a journey to understand strategy & developed my own frame to link it to my experience as a finance professional. Linking great thoughts from Roger or Rumelt to commitment, resource allocation, budgeting etc gave me the link I really needed to take my own journey forward.
The link from strategy to planning & then breaking planning into different buckets makes it so obvious in hindsight after reading your work but very easy to miss. I've seen budgeting as last year plus a percentage with scenario analysis meaning only three scenarios with different assumptions on the numbers without changing the underlying model assumptions.
I took weeks to read through as I as digesting each section before moving to the next.
Keep writing !! and thank you!!
Thank you for the kind feedback, Anand! I’m glad my own journey can be of help to yours.
Yeah, I tend to be very analytical and uncomfortable with things that seem to make sense on their own but don’t quite fit together. The whole dynamic between strategy and planning has been a head scratcher across my entire career. Can’t say that’s the last way I’ll think about the theme, but it does feel like it converges a little bit more each time!
I’m going to publish a new one this Wednesday on why some strategies seem to follow the exact frameworks recommend by great thinkers like Roger Martin and Richard Rumelt, and yet become loose lists of initiatives instead of actual strategies. I think you’ll enjoy it!
Cheers!
https://bovolon.substack.com/p/the-wrong-form-of-strategy
The intellectual gap on this discussion is closed by Alejandro Salazar in “Emergent Strategy and the Death of the strategic plan”
You should definitely take a look
Haven’t read Salazar but I spent a few hours on the corpus and interviews, so provisionally:
The good parts seem real. The death-of-strategic-planning polemic is exactly what’s needed. Two contributions I’d import: the critical coalition as a named social body for strategic conversation, and the hard choice as a coherence test that forces emergent pattern-recognition to culminate in irreversible commitment. Mintzberg describes pattern, Martin prescribes choice, Salazar joins them through paradigm-break commitment inside a disciplined body. Real move.
But from what I’ve read, this doesn’t close the gap. It looks like a sophisticated practitioner-refinement of Mintzberg’s Learning School. Death-of-planning is Mintzberg 1994. The three fallacies are Mintzberg’s three fallacies relabeled. Ladder of inference is Argyris verbatim. The synthesis is Salazar’s great move.