Mintzberg’s 5Ps

Henry Mintzberg‘s has described five ways of looking at strategy as plan, ploy, pattern, position and perspective (cited in Mintzberg 2005). NB there is overlap between these five, and often a given strategy will be describable by any number of these. The main thing to bear in mind, with both Mintzberg & Whittington‘s Ps is that they’re not really a process tool for producing strategies, but they are both excellent tools for analysing and evaluating them. That last is definitely worth doing if you have to devise strategy, before you release it you need to robustly take it apart to ensure that it is fit for purpose. If you find it weak then it isn’t yet ready for prime time.

Plan

This is the most obvious of the ways people see strategy. Most of the published strategy documents you will ever read are plans, an attempt by the strategists to create a way of their organisation being successful. So, for example, a large bank might have a stated ‘plan’ for the future, which is to ensure continued profitability as auniversal bank by avoiding being broken up. How realisable this is depends very much on external influences, primarily government but also public opinion because government is most likely to act when there is a perceived need to be seen to be doing something (Lusk et al, 2008). Planning is all very well, but good strategy needs to be more than just a plan.

PloyThe next most common, and probably the way most non-strategists see strategy. Here it is almost a technique for dealing with things, the killer move, etc. For example, a major corporation might claim that by limiting its tax liability in a particular country it can employ more people and should the government seek to close the tax loopholes then it would be detrimental because it would force it to move its operations offshore. Other things that could come in here, for example, are very large corporations buying up successful start-ups in their field rather than doing their own research.

Pattern

Pattern is the post hoc realisation, often described by analysts, of strategy. Often these can be identified when trying to do things like build a resource based view of an organisation. No less valid, once revealed an emergent strategy may continue to be consciously followed by an organisation. In the example above of buying up start-ups, this might have started off as semi-random acquisitions to get specific useful patents (cheaper and easier than licensing and also

ensures that the competition don’t also get a licence). However after a few of those the company could have decided that this was something that it ought to do consciously.

Position

Rather than having a plan, or using ploys, a company may try and position itself somewhere in its chosen market. For example, in its very early days Amazon tried to position itself as the bookseller of that held everything. Without the physical limits that bricks and mortar bookshops had Amazon could offer a practically unlimited catalogue of every book in print to its customers. Since then Amazon has positioned itself as the premier online marketplace, building on its success as a bookseller in the first place.

Perspective

This is the view that often a strategy can be a way that an organisation views the world. It can be a highly innovative risk taking culture, that siezes opportunities. It might be bound up by legislation, needing careful vetting of proposals before it can change. Both these, and other factors will shape how strategy is developed and implemented in an organisation, and determine what are acceptable and unpalatable options when this is happening. No organisation is truly flexible and cultural limits will always exist when attempting to effect change.