Crafting Strategy (Mintzberg) and Teaching Smart People to Learn (Argyris)

Two friends of mine publish the J&E Alert, a fantastic newsletter highlighting thought provoking thinking on leadership, management and business. Below we share two snippets of their newsletter.

You can subscribe directly by sending an email to the editors (Mireille Jansma & Jurgen Egges)

Video (2 min) – Crafting Strategy (Henry Mintzberg, video by Bobbie Kite, 11 May 2013)

 Intelligent summary of Professor Mintzberg’s ideas on crafting strategy - a concept which is quite different from the notion of strategic planning, as among others advocated by Professor Michael Porter. If you like the video, in this article Henry Mintzberg explains his thoughts in more depth. And if you want to know more about the different viewpoints of Mintzberg and Porter, here is an article at Forbes by Karl Moore (yet another professor): Porter or Mintzberg: Whose view of strategy is the most relevant today?

Based on his lectures and seminars, Henry Mintzberg created a themed discussion workbook called Crafting Strategy. Hundreds of management teams around the world have used this topic workbook to run a self-directed 90 minute session in which they rethink their strategy process and business unit or organizations strategy.

For more information contact us online or call +1 781 489 3418.

Essay - Teaching smart people how to learn (Chris Argyris)

This essay is as pertinent now as when Chris Argyris wrote it, some 20 years ago.

Argyris: "Any company that aspires to succeed in the tougher business environment of the 1990s must first resolve a basic dilemma: success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning, yet most people don’t know how to learn. What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it. I am talking about the well-educated, high-powered, high-commitment professionals who occupy key leadership positions in the modern corporation.

Most companies not only have tremendous difficulty addressing this learning dilemma; they aren’t even aware that it exists. The reason: they misunderstand what learning is and how to bring it about. As a result, they tend to make two mistakes in their

efforts to become a learning organization.

First, most people define learning too narrowly as mere 'problem solving', so they focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment. Solving problems is important. But if learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward.

They need to reflect critically on their own behavior, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organization’s problems, and then change how they act. In particular, they must learn how the very way they go about defining and solving problems can be a source of problems in its own right."