298 Academy oi Management Review January

task structuring, and mechanisms for integration (like coiocation) are also
included in this chapter.
For academics or teaching professionals. Figure 3.4 (sources of infor-
mation for guiding vision) and Figure 7.5 (project time versus prototype
integrity) would make a great basis for any lecture on the subject, and
they are worthy of being made into transparencies.
My two pet peeves about the book were that it has no index (it has only
endnotes), and the voice of the customer (VOC) was not discussed until
page 79.

REFERENCES
Ettlie, J. E., & Penner-Hahn, J. 1993. High technology manufacturing in low technology
plants. Interfaces, 23(6): 25-37.
Ettlie, J. E., & Reza, E. M. 1992. Organizational integration and process innovation. Acad-
emy of Management Journal, 35: 795-827.

The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, by Henry Mintzberg.

New York: Free Press, 1994.
Reviewed by Noel Capon, Graduate School of Business, Columbia Uni-
versity, New York and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

During the past 20 years. Professor Mintzberg has significantly en-

hanced our knowledge of organizations by publishing seminal concep-
tual and empirical research on managerial decision making. It will per-
haps come as no surprise to scholars familiar with his work that, in a book
that draws on such well-known themes from his previous writings as
unrealized and emergent strategies, he does not much care for strategic
planning.
The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning is a substantial piece of work.
Professor Mintzberg lays the groundwork for his argument by spending
considerable effort in both defining planning and presenting alternative
meanings of strategy. He concludes that "sfrafegic planning cannot be
synonymous with strategy formulation" (p. 29) and buttresses this position
with a description of both the classic (circa 1960s) normative models de-
veloped by Ansoff and Steiner, together with several descriptive strategic
planning models. He identifies four key planning hierarchies—
objectives, budgets, strategies, and programs—and concludes that stra-
tegic planning in fact comprises three independent approaches—a num-
bers game geared to motivation and control, capital budgeting, and a
process that seems to be about strategy making but is largely unspeci-
fied. He asserts that, although this strategy-making process is frequently
described in textbooks and planning manuals, "it is difficult to find sys-
tematic evidence that any of this really ever did happen" (p. 90).
In subsequent chapters. Professor Mintzberg presents cogent argu-
1996 Book Reviews 299

ments and significant anecdotal evidence drawn from business firms,

government, and the military regarding the failures of planning with
which many strategic planning practitioners and academic researchers
would agree. These failures include, but are not limited to, its tendency to
undermine both creativity and strategic thinking; be inflexible and breed
resistance to strategic change by generating a climate of conformity; dis-
courage novel ideas in favor of marginal changes and, hence, be short-
term versus long-term focused; and foster dysfunctional political activity
that undermines organizational commitment. In addition, his examina-
tion of the planning/performance literature leads him to conclude that "a
number of biased researchers set out to prove that planning paid, and
collectively they proved no such thing" (p. 134).
Mintzberg argues that strategy making requires insight, creativity, and
synthesis—and above all integration, whereas planning focuses on anal-
ysis and decomposition. He presents empirical evidence that strategy
making occurs irregularly and unexpectedly and is frequently informal
(intuitive). He further asserts that strategy cannot be developed to a plan-
ning timetable. Plans, he argues, require forecasts, yet not only is fore-
casting ever more difficult as environmental turbulence increases, the
coexistence of inflexible plans and environmental change can spell di-
saster. Furthermore, planning systems foster the detachment of planners
from the day-to-day realities of business life and, as a result, planning
tends to rely on hard data of questionable value rather than on qualita-
tive insights and the apparently mundane but critical everyday data.
Mintzberg is led to the inevitable conclusion that the term strategic plan-
ning is an oxymoron.
Many of Mintzberg's criticisms of strategic planning practice are valid,
but rather than being presented in a balanced, dispassionate, and schol-
arly manner in which the failures of strategic planning are set against its
merits, the reader is faced with over 300 pages worth of argument, some-
what evangelical in tone, directed against strategic planning. This one-
sided treatment is regrettable because strategic planning is a critically
important topic for today's corporations.
Furthermore, Mintzberg presents no solid evidence that strategic plan-
ning practice has atrophied; he seems to rely for evidence on a number of
anecdotes and a 1984 Business Week article. Even though at one point he
asserts that "what all this evidence cries out for is in-depth investigation
of planning itself" (p. 105), one of the significant disappointments of this
book is that, despite his demonstrated ability to conduct high-quality
empirical research, in this volume Professor Mintzberg presents no new
empirical findings. The substance is largely drawn from the published
planning literature, much of which, as he readily acknowledges, is rather
"banal."
Mintzberg is certainly correct in his assessment that the planning/
performance literature he examines is equivocal regarding the impact
that planning has on performance. However, he omits from his review
300 Academy of Management Review January

perhaps the most substantial extant study of planning practice to address

this issue (Capon, Farley, & Hulbert, 1988), and a follow-up report (Capon,
Farley, & Hulbert, 1994) to which he had prepublication access. In both
studies, based on personal interview data from over 100 Fortune 500 man-
ufacturing firms, the authors demonstrate performance advantages for
those firms practicing what they term corporate- or business-level strate-
gic planning versus similar firms practicing corporate- or business-level
financial planning.
Perhaps even more egregious is Mintzberg's reliance on a biased se-
lection of anecdotes with which to make his case. From each of three
domains—business, government, and military—in which he identifies
planning failures, he could equally well have identified planning suc-
cesses. He focuses on the French government's failure with indicative
planning, but does he really believe that MITI's planners had no role in
the postwar success of Japanese corporations or that Singapore's substan-
tial economic growth has been achieved in the absence of planning?
Certainly, many readers would agree with his assessment that British
army and Pentagon planners respectively failed at the Battle of Passchen-
daele in World War I and in Vietnam, but would he seriously support the
proposition that the successful German advance through Europe in 1940,
Montgomery's defeat of Rommel at El Alamein, and the Allies' successful
invasion of France in 1944 were achieved in the absence of planning? And
for each of his several business cases of strategic planning failure nu-
merous counterexamples can be identified; for example, the most ambi-
tious restructuring ever of a major corporation, the transformation of
American Can into Primerica, was based on the results of a thorough
strategic planning exercise.
Mintzberg's arguments against strategic planning are based in part on
empirical data from his own strategy-tracking studies, in particular the
long-term study of the Steinberg supermarket chain, in which he docu-
mented intuitively developed strategy and other findings that show strat-
egy as a grass-roots activity, emerging at low levels in the organization.
Without denying that strategic decision making in organizations occurs in
such fashions, or as the result of "logical incrementalism," these data
clearly do not confirm the fall of strategic planning in an empirical sense.
Perhaps this writer is guilty of some combination of "withdrawal, fantasy,
and projection" (p. 135), those sins of which Mintzberg accuses the pro-
ponents of strategic planning, but it is his causal observation from many
meetings with senior executives of major corporations that strategic plan-
ning is alive and well, albeit perhaps in a different form than the overly
formalistic approaches of the 1960s and 1970s.
In his final chapter. Professor Mintzberg retreats from his acknowl-
edged excesses in earlier chapters and presents numerous positive as-
pects of planning, plans, and planners. He attempts to balance his
"highly critical. . . discussion" (p. 323) of the preceding five chapters and
surprises the reader with his admission that notwithstanding "the tone of
1996 Book Reviews 301

our discussion . . . we never had any intention of dismissing planning."

This reader was certainly taken in.
In summary, one is left with the uncomfortable feeling that the sub-
stance of Mintzberg's book has focused on the straw man of overly for-
malistic long-term planning processes and that critical distinctions be-
tween long-run and short-run planning, formal and less formal planning,
corporate- and business-level planning, strategic and financial planning
(and their combinations) have been insufficiently sharply made and ex-
plored. Notwithstanding the several criticisms in this review, his book
provides an invaluable resource for those executives and researchers
seeking to understand the problems, difficulties, and deficiencies of plan-
ning processes.
Certainly, strategic planning is no panacea, but just as marriage, de-
spite its many failures, remains a viable yet adaptive institution, so a
thorough contemporary empirical study may demonstrate that strategic
planning also survives robustly in an ever-adapting form. Professor Mint-
zberg and the writer are in agreement on the need for more empirical
research; perhaps, some collaborative efforts are in order!
REFERENCES
Capon, N., Farley, J. U., & Hulbert, J. 1988. Corporate strategic planning. New York: Colum-
bia University Press.
Capon, N., Farley, J. U.. & Hulbert, J. 1994. Strategic planning and financial performance:
More evidence. Journal of Management Studies, 31: 105-110.