Mintzberg's Five Concepts Of Strategy In A Changing Environment

Introduction Johnson et al. (2008) stated that strategy is the direction and scope of the organisation which helps the organisation achieves the advantage in a changing environment by using its resources and competencies in order to fulfil the stakeholder expectation. Miller and Dess (1996) defined strategy is a set of plans made in effort in order to help the organisation to achieve their goals. Mintzberg (1987) introduced two concepts to further explain the strategy.

Concept I

Mintzberg (1987) identified five definitions of strategy as the plan, ploy, pattern, position, and perspectives. The strategy is a plan as the direction, a guideline and conscious action in order to deal with a situation that faced by the organisation (Mintzberg

Moreover, the strategy can also be identified as perspectives which are the ways of the organisation doing things (Mintzberg, 1987).The strategy is perspectives that shared by the members of the organisation through their action, in another word, it is culture. For instance, Toyota is successful because of its people; the company expects that their employee to have self-improvement process and illustrate that it values their

The TOWS matrixes are consists of the strength, weaknesses, threat and opportunity that help the organisation to know more information about their internal and external environment. For instance, the strength and opportunity of Volkswagen in TOWS matrix are the company should develop and produce multiproduct line with many options in different price of class whereas the strategic and threat is improve fuel consumption through fuel injection and develop fuel efficient diesel engines. Another method that used to reduce the uncertainty is BCG matrix. Henderson (1979) defined that BCG matrix used to determine what priorities should be given in the product portfolio of a business unit; it consists of four categories which are star, cash cow, problem child and dog, the organisation need to make sure which categories that is suitable to be choose in order to reduce the uncertainty. However, strategy might become a force that resists change. The company might fail to improve their product through innovation. As a result, they may unable to compete with their competitor because of they refuse to change and stick with their own strategy. For example, Toyota failed to think about the innovation of their product because they are too focusing on their effective cost