“Just as bad money has always driven out good, so the talented general manager — the person who makes a company go — is being overwhelmed by a flood of so-called professionals,' textbook executives more interested in the form of management than the content, more concerned about defining and categorizing and quantifying the job, than in getting it done. . . . They have created false expectations and wasted untold man-hours by making a religion of formal long-range planning.”1 H. E. Wrapp, New York Times.
Two previous articles have tried to demonstrate why executives managing strategic change in large organizations should not — and do not — follow highly formalized textbook approaches in long-range planning, goal generation, and strategy formulation.2 Instead, they artfully blend formal analysis, behavioral techniques, and power politics to bring about cohesive, step-by-step movement toward ends which initially are broadly conceived, but which are then constantly refined and reshaped as new information appears.3 Their integrating methodology can best be described as “logical incrementalism.”
But is this truly a process in itself, capable of being managed? Or does it simply amount to applied intuition? Are there some conceptual structures, principles, or paradigms that are generally useful? Wrapp, Normann, Braybrooke, Lindblom, and Bennis have provided some macrostructures incorporating many important elements they have observed in strategic... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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