“Crafting Strategy” (Mintzberg, 1987)
Positioning in the Field of Strategy
“…I believe the problem often lies one step beyond, in the distinction we make between formulation and implementation, the common assumption that thought must be independent of (and precede) action.” (Mintzberg, 1987)

The above quotation, taken from Henry Mintzberg’s “Crafting Strategy”, concisely outlines one of the most prominent debates in the field of strategy over the last fifty years. Although the field is heavily fragmented - a feature highlighted by Mintzberg’ et al.’s “Ten Schools of Thought” model (1998) – it can be reduced into the two key approaches implicit above: the prescriptive, or Planning School, and the descriptive, or Learning School.
The prescriptive approach describes strategy formation as a deliberate, conscious process of thought that comes prior to implementation. Most authors from this school define strategy as the establishment of a company’s future position [see, for example, Andrews, 1965; Ansoff, 1965, Byers,
1985; Chandler, 1962], illustrating how planning is a cornerstone of the prescriptive approach to strategic management. Serving as a juxtaposition, the descriptive approach suggests that strategies will emerge through the process of trial-and-error and that intention need not precede action.
Mintzberg and Waters (1985) argue that the “open, flexible and responsive” nature of emergent strategies is especially important during crises when the environment is too unstable to follow [also, see Grant, 1998], whereas Lynch (2000) contributes that emergent strategies are undertaken by firms that repeatedly analyse their environments.
Over the past decades, studies regarding the effectiveness of planning in a company’s performance have been widely inconclusive [Boyd, 1991; Miller and Cardinal, 1994; Pearce et al. 1987; Schwenk and Schrader,