The Crafts of Strategy Special Issue Introduction

Critical Analysis

As the authors introduce the readings in this special issue, they describe an article by Nordqvist and Melin: “Here they pick up Mintzberg’s original argument and propose that such [management] consultants are not simply strategic thinkers and analysts, but social craftspersons, who have to work closely and sensitively with the human materials of their client organizations.”

This is an often unspoken, but real, perspective on the material of strategy: that the people are the raw material. A generous positioning of this is as subtle influencing and consensus-driving, while a more negative view is that the employees are pawns in a larger game, forced into behavior through policies and organizational structures. Either way, this is a compelling argument for what a strategist can manipulate with few levels of abstraction between themselves and the raw material. They clearly do not physically touch another person, yet a reorg has immediacy and clear causality (this decision leads to this person being fired or promoted). This manipulation is pretty blunt and thick. Less obvious is how this material is manipulated in a more subtle manner, to take specific actions or perform their work in certain ways, and this becomes even less clear when discussing creative workers.

In design strategy, this might be thought of as creative direction, but this shifts the metaphor from people as material, to people as tools or extensions of a strategist’s mind and body. The metaphor plays through: the more skill a creative director has with their tools, the more they can have those tools do what they want. The material, then, is many designers orchestrating many designs in support of some vision. But there are too many abstractions here: between the strategist and the vision are, at least, levels of management and leadership, individual designers, their skills, their software, and then the artifacts they produce. If creative vision is the material, and the people are the tools, the designer is left with pretty diffused control.