4.3 Compare and apply information
Are the main points relevant/irrelevant for your organisation or industry? If so, why?
Here you need to consider how using the concepts in your own organisation or industry would advance your understanding, providing useful insight into strategy within your own specific contexts. It is important not to think about how you can fit your organisation’s activity to Mintzberg’s concepts, but how his framings of strategy represent your organisational activity – if they do, they may be useful; if they don’t, you may want to consider alternative conceptualisations.
What are the wider societal implications of the article, if any?
Mintzberg is a leading figure in management and strategy, and therefore his thoughts and ideas are influential across the globe as business schools and practitioners pick up on them and seek to apply his theories. By advancing the notion of multidimensional strategy, he questions unidimensional understandings influencing how strategy is interpreted and made sense of.
What’s missing from the article that you feel should be there?
To most effectively address this question, it is perhaps best to have a framing of strategy in mind that you can assess the article against. This does not need to be a rigid definition of strategy, but some understanding about the sort of things you would expect to read in any article that seeks to conceptualise strategy. This needs to be firm enough so that you have a clear understanding of strategy, but sufficiently loose so that your thinking can be challenged and developed through exposure to new ideas, and cutting-edge research and thinking.