Mintzberg 5Ps of strategy | what is strategy

Hello and welcome to Edify Educational Society. Today's blog where we're looking at Mintzberg 5ps of strategy.

what is strategy

So, most people do strategy the wrong way. Most people in companies take a very simplistic approach to strategy development.

possibly they brainstorm their way through a swot analysis and then from this, they try to conspiracy their way instantly to world domination.

Now unfortunately, this very simple approach is one which is unlikely to give great results. To get your strategy right you will need to invest a lot of time into thinking about it and developing your strategy.

Now one of the main reasons why most people get strategy wrong. Is because they believe that strategy is about competing to be the best but it isn't. It's about competing to be unique. And this fact that most people get the strategy wrong.

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Mintzberg 5Ps of strategy

Leads us nicely to Mintzberg 5ps of strategy. Mintzberg recognized that strategy is a difficult thing to get right. And that it takes deep thought and lots of time. And even if you do get it right your strategy could be performed dated overnight by a competitor.

So, to help you develop a better strategy Mintzberg developed his 5Ps of strategy. And the 5Ps are simply five different viewpoints. That you can look at your strategy from each P throws new light onto, what strategy means from a different viewpoint. The idea is that by thinking about your strategy from five different perspectives. You will get a more robust strategy. Then if you just use a couple of sentences to describe it.

So, what are the 5Ps, -

1.     Plan

2.     Ploy

3.     Pattern

4.     Position

5.     Perspective

So, let's examine each of these in turn.

Plan

So firstly, a good strategy must have a plan. A course of action you intend to take or a series of guidelines that you intend to follow.

Now the purpose of the plan is to get you from where you are now to where you want to be. And planning is usually what comes to mind immediately when people think about strategy development.

All plans have two characteristics, they are developed purposely and in advance. And planning is of course an essential part of strategy development. But on its own, it isn't enough to ensure you have a great strategy. That's why we have the other four viewpoints.

Ploy

So, the second viewpoint is a ploy. And you can think of ploy as being something we do to get the better of a competitor. And of course, in business, there is no way to avoid competitors.

So, ploys are specific tactics to try and outsmart or disrupt what your competitor is doing. And examples are ploys include dropping prices to deter competitors, filing for patents, threatening legal action and there's many more besides.

So, ploys tend to be short-term tactics. And a ploy to can be a good thing. But it's important not to focus solely on your competitors. So, that you lose sight of your own long-term strategic plan.

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Pattern

The third viewpoint is the pattern. So, where we are as we're saying that defining our strategy as a plan and a few ploys isn't enough. We also need to look at our behaviours.

Now that makes sense because the output from a strategy doesn't come from the plan or the ploy. It comes from the actions that we're going to take every day. So, if we think about strategy as a pattern. It's about looking at what kind of behaviours have worked for us in the past. And then it's about deciding which of these patterns of behaviour we want to continue or enhance or even stop doing.

So, you can think of the plan as being the intended strategy and the pattern as being the realized strategy of what we do every day.

So, as an example of a simple pattern. Imagine if every decision throughout your organization was being made with your customer in mind. Now, this behaviour will have already resulted in some great products in the marketplace. And as such it's probably a behaviour you will want to keep and even articulate explicitly in your strategy.

Position Mintzberg 5ps of strategy

So, the fourth viewpoint is the position. And it's yet another way to define your strategy. Position tells you where you sit on the playing field relative to your competitors. So, example positions include being the cheapest, having the most features, servicing a particular customer niche, having world-beating customer service. The position answers the question of how are we going to carve out a piece of the market for ourselves. And there will be pros and cons of course to each answer.

So, part of strategy development is to work through these pros and cons and make some deliver deliberate decisions based on them.

Perspective

The final viewpoint of the five-piece is perspective. Now whilst this position looks out to the world, perspective looks internally. Prospective looks at shaping the personality and culture of the organization. Your aspects will be set from how you view the marketplace. And what you perceive it wants.

So for example, an accountancy firms view of the world will be very different from a Silicon Valley high-tech start-ups’ view. So, as an example so suppose you feel that your market place is relatively stable. And wants the highest-quality product. Now in this scenario, you'll probably build your culture around high-quality execution and cost control.

So conversely in a new market where the speed of product development is the most important factor. You will need a different approach in this case. You'll build your culture around rapid development and failing fast but moving forward.

Now in order for perspective to be useful. It needs to be shared by all members of an organization. It must also be lived by the actions that everyone in the organization takes every day.

So, because of this, a large part of senior management's job will be trying to make everyone share the same perspective. And this is usually done through sharing the vision and values of the organization. Along with the roadmap to realize that vision.

Example Mintzberg 5ps of strategy

So, let's look at an example, in this case, we're going to look at the 5Ps as they apply to apple.

Now of course only apple knows its own true strategy. So, we're just using this simple example as a means to show the 5Ps in action.

So firstly plan, so apple's plan is to continue to consistently build the easiest to use. And most intuitive consumer electronics and whilst doing this you know continue to expand their app ecosystem. Their ploy is based around Apple being frequently ahead of competitors in terms of innovation. Now because of that as a ploy, they're able to threaten to sue any competitors that might try to replicate or closely mimic their technology. In terms of pattern, Apple responds to the challenge of competition through innovation. Now some of those innovations will be complete failures but others are going to be great successes. In terms of position, Apple products are positioned at the high end. They're high-quality intuitive to active design. Covering both hardware and software. Is very difficult to compete against. And when we think about perspective then one of the apple values is to think differently. So, it's culture and personality is all about making the best products in the marketplace and doing so in an innovative way.

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Summarize

So, in summary, Mintzberg five keys of strategy gives us five viewpoints to examine any strategy to ensure its robustness. And we can summarize the 5PS as planned and that's the plan by which the organization hopes to achieve its aims. ploy that's a specific tactic or tactics to outwit a competitor. Pattern and a pattern are something the highlights that strategy isn't it an event it's a consistent a series of actions moving the organization towards its aims. Position meaning the position of each product in the marketplace relative to competitors. And finally, perspective and that's the organization's culture and personality its way of getting things done.

So that's it for today's blog. We really hope you enjoyed it and thanks for reading.