Strategy School 9: The Environmental School

9. The Environmental School: Strategy formation as a Reactive Process

This post is continuation of my previous posts on strategy, based on Mintzberg's book Strategy Safari.

Leadership as well as organization becomes subordinate to external environment. The environmental school has its roots in contingency theory, which grew up to oppose the confident assertions of classical management that there is “one best way” to run the organization. To contingency theorists, “it all depends”: on the size of the organization, its technology, the stability of its context, external hostility, and so on.

Premises of the Environmental School

• The environment, presenting itself to the organization as a set of general forces, is the central actor in the strategy-making process
• The organization must respond to these forces, or else be “selected out”
• Leadership thus becomes a passive element for purposes of reading the environment and ensuring proper adaptation by the organization
• Organizations end up clustering together in distinct ecological-type niches, positions where they remain until resources become scarce or conditions too hostile. Then they die.

Critique of the Environmental School

The greatest weakness is that environment is often so abstract and vague.

Thank you very much,

RamP!