There are two people, and only two, whose ideas must be taught to every

MBA in the world: Michael Porter and Henry Mintzberg. This was true
more than 25 years ago, when I did my MBA at USC. These are two
academics who have had real impact for a long time. Part of their
success, beyond having big relevant ideas, is due to their clear and
concise writing skills (There is certainly a lesson in there for many of us
business school academics).
Both have been very influential in the study of strategy, an area of
considerable interest to many Forbes readers. You can contrast their two
views as Porters taking a more deliberate strategy approach while
Mintzbergs emphasize emergent strategy. Both are still taught, in fact, I
taught Porters 3 Generic Strategies and his 5 Forces Model not two weeks
ago in an undergraduate strategy course at McGill. Which is most useful
today?
The world of deliberate strategy is one that I remember well from my days
as a corporate manager at IBM and then as an executive teacher at
Oxford and LBS. It was a world of strategy planning weekends at posh
hotels in the English countryside, where we sat in rooms discussing the 5
Forces in our particular industry and what would we change in the model if
we had a fairys magic wand. The output was 3 ring binders in North
America and 2 ring binders in Europe. This worked well in its day, back in
the 80s and part of the 90s, wonderful times now looking back on it, when
the past was quite helpful in predicting the future. However, the nature of
the world today no longer lends itself, by in large, to this type of strategy.
Emergent strategy is the view that strategy emerges over time as
intentions collide with and accommodate a changing reality. Emergent
strategy is a set of actions, or behavior, consistent over time, a realized
pattern [that] was not expressly intended in the original planning of
strategy. Emergent strategy implies that an organization is learning what
works in practice. Given todays world, I think emergent strategy is on the
upswing. Heres why.
But first, in the interest of transparency, I have worked closely with Henry
co-directing and co-teaching on Leadership Programs at McGill, where we
are both on the faculty, for more than a decade. In fact, many times, I
have presented key parts of Porters ideas on strategy for a couple of
hours and then Henry presents his ideas as a contrast to Michaels. We
started doing this tag team effort about 11 years ago and it has become
increasingly easy for Henry to shoot me down in the last few years. And
the executives in the class agree with Henry.
It seems the relatively stable world of (at least part of) my corporate
career has gone the way of the dodo. At times, it seems the worlds gone
nuts. Let me count the ways: Japan, the PIGS, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina,
SARS, the financial collapse of 2008 and 2009, the BP oil spill, and many

more examples. As one writer put in it this weekendsSunday New York

Times, For a moment, all the swans seemed black. However, as my
friend Dick Evans, ex-CEO of Alcan, pointed out that my memory was
being a bit selective, as it was not only recently that stability seems to
have gone out the window. He reminded me of the time he was stationed
in Africa experiencing 3 coups and then back in the USA in the midst of
the junk bond raiders, a wrenching manufacturing recession and the fall of
the Iron Curtain not to mention personally experiencing the Loma Prieta
earthquake. All of these seemed pretty black swanish to me at the
time! Fair point, nevertheless, it seems that strategy has shifted in the
last decade to where the planning school no longer has the street cred it
once had. It is precisely because we cannot, try as we may, control the
variables that factor into business decisions that Mintzbergs emergent
strategy is so useful.
Porters ideas are still relevant, my colleagues and I still teach them, so I
still believe in them and when I talk to corporate CEOs they still use them
as part of their strategy planning thinking. But they are getting a bit long
in the tooth for todays different world. Henrys emergent strategy ideas
simply seem to be more relevant to the world we live in today they
reflect the fact that our plans will fail. This is not to say that planning isnt
useful, but other than some long term technology plans, the day of the 5
year and even 2 year plans has faded and emergent strategy is the reality
in most industries that I work with. You must be much more fleet of foot,
strategic flexibility is what we are looking for in most industries. The
boundaries are more fluid now. For many, albeit not all, knowing what
industry you are in is not as clear cut as it once was. This makes industry
analysis less easy. The value chain is now shared across firm boundaries
and at times, in part, in common with competitors.

Though I think that Henrys ideas have pulled ahead of Michaels, I very
much keep on an eye on Porters thinking. I interviewed him recently for a
weekly videocast I do for the Globe and Mail, Canadas National
Newspaper, because his new ideas are very much current. Interestingly
both Porter and Mintzberg started to put a great deal of their attention on
Health Care about 8-10 years ago. They approach the topic differently.
Porter is in the U.S. and Mintzberg in Canada, which have quite different
health care systems, yet when I realized this it was clear signal to me that
this is an area that I should pay attention to. The other thing Porter has
been working on, Corporate Social Responsibility, suggests a fairly
fundamental change in how corporate American runs itself. Meanwhile,
Henry is working on Rebalancing Societyradical renewal beyond Smith
and Marx.

So when it comes to Strategy I think Henrys ideas are au courant. Yet

when I consider their most recent respective work I see that they are
looking at two not dissimilar topics, albeit in different ways. We are
indeed fortunate that these two outstanding minds are still at it when
many others are retired. Still two, too very much keep an eye on!