Mark Mayer: Strategy inflexibility risks missed opportunities

The recent (and continuing) tariff roller coaster made me think of one of my favorite business articles of all time: Henry Mintzberg’s 1987 essay “Crafting Strategy.” It offered a magnificent perspective on how strategy actually takes shape inside organizations and, just as important, how leaders should steer it. It’s perhaps more relevant today than ever.

So, while part of me wants to write about HBO’s “Succession” (there will never be enough written about that show!) or a hot new strategy model, I’ll sing the praises of this classic instead.

If I told you to close your eyes and tell me the first thing that comes to mind when I say strategy—and I’ve done this with students ranging from undergraduates to early-career MBAs to seasoned executives—the odds are, you’ll say something like planning or road map or something of that nature. Perhaps you visualize a boardroom with growth plans up on a PowerPoint. The planned strategy ritual is reassuring: defining overarching goals, setting milestones, assigning resources, publishing the road map, setting tactics, measuring key performance indicators and achieving goals. Even the jargon—“alignment,” “North Star,” “pillar”—suggests a fundamental permanence. In this mental model, planning equals prudence, and to skip it is to invite anarchy.

And planning deserves its due. Without some intended strategy, chaos would reign supreme. Perhaps you’ve worked in an environment like that—it’s terrible! Because of that, most managerial frameworks double down on the blueprint mindset. Michael Porter dissects competitive advantage into neatly delineated classic forces. Goal-setting frameworks convert moon-shot dreams into quarterly scoreboard metrics with ledger-book crispness. The “balanced scorecard” installs a cockpit of dials and gauges, each one reflecting a pre-agreed path to value.

There is value in these, but this is also precisely where Mintzberg needs to come into the conversation. He argues that the strategist is not truly an architect drafting blueprints but a potter shaping clay. Maybe it’s the former English major in me, but I find this an irresistibly perfect metaphor. At the wheel, she starts with an intention—a slender vase, perhaps—and maybe that plan comes to fruition, but maybe the clay resists. Maybe there’s a wobble, maybe moisture alters pliability, maybe it’s a minor problem, but maybe it’s more fundamental. Rather than discard the piece, she adjusts, sensing possibility in every deviation. By the time the kiln fires, the finished form carries fingerprints of a continuous dialogue between vision and material, but it’s often not the exact “intended” form.

Mintzberg’s distinction between deliberate and emergent strategy rewired my professional outlook during my MBA. The deliberate side is everything we mean to do. Plans telling a story of the future we anticipate. But emergent strategy is what actually coalesces through thousands of near-term choices and real-time reactions.

Sometimes the forces are massive. Did you plan for COVID? I sure didn’t. AI? I have colleagues who believe the sky is falling due to AI (yikes), and others who believe it to be an amazing opportunity to enhance student learning and skill development (cough cough). Others are somehow trying to ignore it (audible sigh). They have one thing in common: A decade or so ago, AI wasn’t even on their radar screens.

I remember working at Nabisco when the carb craze hit. Somehow, even short-term brand plans at a massive, consumer-centric company missed the single biggest factor affecting sales the next year. Why? Because we didn’t have a functional crystal ball.

Consumer tastes change, technology changes, customer needs change and competitors change. These external shocks can be like business earthquakes—think of pandemics, tariff skirmishes or generative-AI arms races—but quieter drifts reshape context every day. A logistics partner automates a dock, a competitor quietly tests subscription pricing, or a regulator floats guidance that will soon harden into law. Inside the firm, talent ebbs and flows, new tools expose hidden costs, and a rogue experiment in digital marketing produces a bump no spreadsheet predicted.

In such conditions, the original plan becomes a hypothesis in constant need of stress-testing. The craft lies not in discarding foresight but in marrying it to vigilant sense-making and navigating a new course or reimagining the clay on the wheel.

Know that, every once in a while, a rogue wave will come, and that wave can decimate. Nokia, once the global synonym for “cellphone,” clung to an old way. Blockbuster, the hub of millions of families’ Friday nights, clung to an old way. One of the greatest jobs I ever had was working in a video store—but I have to explain to my kids what a video store even was!

Contrast those cautionary tales with firms that treat strategy as a living craft. Microsoft’s revival sprang from a willingness to jettison Windows-centrism and chase cloud and AI—moves that have lifted the firm past a $3 trillion valuation in just a decade. (And I pay Microsoft monthly so my son can play a library of video games with controllers that have way too many buttons for me!) Amazon’s engineers built a few reusable computing tools for in-house projects, discovered that outsiders would pay for the same building blocks, and AWS is now the company’s biggest profit engine.

To be clear, “crafting strategy” is a perspective for all. The ability to improvise is mission-critical for giants, but it is existential for small businesses and entrepreneurs. A Fortune 500 company can often misread a trend and survive on accumulated cash. A five-person startup has no such margin. For an entrepreneur, emergent strategy is more than theory—it is protection against extinction.

So how do owners practice the craft? Managing strategy as craft starts with cultivating a culture of curiosity and learning. I love a nice Tableau dashboard, but executives can’t just rely on those. They only explain what has happened. Reserve bandwidth for micro-experiments. When every dollar is chained to existing promises, pivots become unaffordable. Set aside a modest “option budget” for rapid tests. Next, treat anomalies as possible inflection points, not rounding errors. A spike in inquiries from an unexpected segment could be nuisance noise—or the first ping of a lucrative new niche.

Reward teams for surfacing what has changed, not just for hitting legacy targets. A culture that punishes deviation smothers the curiosity that emergent strategy needs in order to surface. Budget and bandwidth should always include room for quick experiments. Emergent opportunities rarely wait for the next formal funding cycle.

And perhaps most important, embrace listening. Senior leadership must hear the front-line hum without translation loss. A barista’s offhand remark about customer traffic can be an early warning signal no dashboard captures. Do the qualitative research that uncovers the big “we didn’t think of that” exploration, not just the big data explanation. Treat anomalies as potential inflection points rather than rounding errors. And yes, know that occasionally the rogue wave will come, and a sea change might be afoot. Big moves, pivots and sacrifices might be in order.•

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Mayer is clinical associate professor of marketing at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University Indianapolis.