Theory of Constraints Handbook - James Cox Iii [349]
The Design School, one of the earliest to emerge, focuses on the ability of senior management to find a workable strategic solution while taking account of internal strengths and weaknesses in the light of external threats and opportunities. From this combination of internal capabilities and constraints coupled with external contingencies, a strategy is fitted or designed to best serve the situation in which the organization finds itself. There is no strict, particularly analytical, or structured formal process, and the central figure in strategy development is the senior executive officer. Intuition of top management is important to the success of the strategy, which is deliberately kept as simple as possible and focused. Until the 1970s, this was the dominant view of strategic management with lasting influence even today.
Ansoff was an important early influence for the Planning School, which is characterized by many of the assumptions of the Design School coupled with a formalized, analytic approach to devising business strategy. This process is intentionally step-by-step, supported by techniques that zero in on meeting specific objectives, budgets, and program details.
The Positioning School may be the school that most people think of when they think of management strategy. Given impetus by Porter’s work as well as the Boston Consulting Group and the PIMS project,1 this school traces its history back through military strategy to Sun Tzu circa 400 BC Advocates of the Positioning School believe that strategy can be reduced to generic positions, each representing a formalized compilation of characteristics and industry situations for which generic strategies may be applied as starting templates. The approach is highly analytical; therefore, it is hardly surprising that TOC—with its analytical disposition—has used this approach in identifying and describing its litany of “marketing solutions” according to situational characteristics of the company’s milieu.
The Entrepreneurial School, like the Design School, focuses on the top executive, but the emphasis is on the cachet associated with a talented individual’s mysterious intuition. Rather than using structured methods of developing strategies or analytical means to devise the “right” approach, these strategists focus on the charisma and talent of a central forceful leader who can use his or her creativity to the organization’s ultimate advantage in the marketplace. Moreover, the leader exercises tight control over the details of an implementation.
The Cognitive School is comprised of two important orientations. Largely academic, students of this school examine the cognitive processes that people use to arrive at strategies, processes such as mental mapping and conceptual modeling. This school looks at how people reason and arrive at their individual perspectives. The focus is on cognition as information processing, how people are influenced, and what schemas they use to interpret the world. More recently, another view has emerged that focuses on strategies as creative interpretations of reality rather than the objective rendering of reality.
The Learning School, through the work of Lindblom (1959), Quinn, (1980), Mintzberg (1978), Mintzberg and McHugh (1985), and others, sees strategy development and implementation as a less structured and intentional process. Rather, strategies evolve incrementally as learning takes place. Formulation and implementation merge, and the result may be something unexpected and creatively discontinuous.
Whether a strategy develops within a firm or as a reaction to forces external to the firm, the Power School views the strategy as an essentially political process. Bargaining, persuasion, and encounters between power dispensers within