Strategic Thinking for Managers: Understanding Competition, Industry Structure, and Organizational Positioning

In many organizations strategy is an event on the calendar. A planning unit circulates templates, departments return environmental scans and SWOT grids, targets are cascaded, and the board approves a document that will be revised in twelve months. Mintzberg attacked this routine in The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (1994), condensed the same year in a Harvard Business Review article. His starting point was blunt: "strategic planning is not strategic thinking." Planning, as he described it, is analysis. It breaks a goal into steps, formalizes the steps so they can be carried out almost automatically, and states the expected result of each. "Strategic thinking, in contrast, is about synthesis. It involves intuition and creativity." Its output is an integrated perspective on the enterprise, a sense of direction that may be only loosely put into words.

Mintzberg located the failure of formal planning in what he called its grand fallacy: "because analysis encompasses synthesis, strategic planning is strategy making." Three assumptions hold the fallacy up. The first is that the future can be predicted well enough to plan against. Seasonal patterns can be forecast, he argued, but discontinuities such as a technological innovation or a price increase almost never can. He picked out Igor Ansoff's 1965 definition of a firm's planning horizon, the period for which it can forecast with an accuracy of about plus or minus 20 percent, and asked how any company could know what that period was.

The second assumption is detachment: that strategists can work from aggregated reports, away from operations, and still understand the business, even though hard data arrives late and without the texture a manager close to customers picks up. The third is formalization. Formal systems could certainly process more hard information, Mintzberg wrote, "But they could never internalize it, comprehend it, synthesize it."

Summaries often miss that Mintzberg did not propose getting rid of planners. He wanted them to work around the strategy-making process, not inside it: supplying analysis "to broaden the consideration of issues rather than to discover the one right answer," acting as catalysts who push line managers to think strategically, finding strategies already forming in the organization's activities, and programming an agreed strategy into budgets and schedules. Nor did he treat formal programming as always wrong. It made sense, he wrote, when an organization was sure of the relative stability of its environment and needed tight coordination of many intricate operations, as airlines do for scheduling. The critique is contingent, and that matters for the debate in Section 3.

If planning is not strategic thinking, what is? Jeanne Liedtka (1998) offered a positive account built from five elements. A systems perspective is a working model of how value is created across the organization and its environment. Being intent-focused means holding a sense of direction that concentrates effort, and intelligent opportunism means staying open to developments the intended strategy did not foresee. Thinking in time connects the organization's past, present and future, while being hypothesis-driven means forming conjectures about where advantage might lie and testing them. The last element is where analysis returns: a strategist uses an industry analysis to test a specific idea about why a market might reward a particular position, and drops the idea if the evidence goes against it.

Mintzberg's research group at McGill separated the strategy an organization intends from the strategy it realizes, meaning the pattern that actually appears in its decisions over time. Intentions that are carried out produce deliberate strategy. Intentions that "do not produce the desired actions" leave unrealized strategy. Patterns that form without clear intentions, or in spite of them, the group called emergent strategy.

In "Crafting Strategy" (1987) Mintzberg's example was Canada's National Film Board. One filmmaker's project unexpectedly ran to feature length. To distribute it the NFB turned to cinemas, and so gained experience in marketing feature films. Other filmmakers took up the idea, and the board eventually found itself pursuing a feature-film strategy that nobody had set out to adopt. "My point is simple, deceptively simple," he wrote: "strategies can form as well as be formulated." The managerial consequence concerns information. A salesperson who finds a customer with an unmet need may hold the most strategic piece of information in the organization, and it is wasted if the channels upward are blocked or "the formulators have simply finished formulating."

None of this makes emergent strategy good and deliberate strategy bad. "In practice, of course, all strategy making walks on two feet, one deliberate, the other emergent," Mintzberg wrote, because "just as purely deliberate strategy making precludes learning, so purely emergent strategy making precludes control." The middle course he described most fully was the umbrella strategy, in which senior management sets broad guidelines and leaves the specifics to people lower down. His example was IBM in the early 1960s, whose senior management approved broad design criteria for the 360 family of computers and left the detailed development to the rest of the organization.

Some commitments cannot emerge from below, however. In January 2026 Grameenphone paid Tk 2,370 crore for 10 MHz of spectrum in the 700 MHz band, the only bidder in that auction (The Daily Star, 21 January 2026). A purchase of that size is made once, by a board, against a forecast. Mintzberg's argument does not remove the need for decisions like this. It warns against assuming that the forecast and the plan built on it are where the strategy came from.

In 1990 Mintzberg published in the Strategic Management Journal a critique of what he called the design school, the model that "underlies almost all prescription in the field." It treats strategy formation as a process of design aimed at "an essential fit between external threat and opportunity and internal distinctive competence," and its premises include conscious control by the chief executive and strategies that "appear fully formulated before they are implemented." The paper questioned the conscious assessment of strengths and weaknesses, the demand that strategies be made explicit, and the separation of formulation from implementation.

Igor Ansoff's reply (1991) judged the critique on its "methodological soundness and factual veracity" and found it "deficient on both." Two charges carried the weight. Mintzberg had generalized "from a sample of one," building his picture of the design school largely on a single text. And he had failed to separate description from prescription, moving from the observation that strategies often emerge to the implication that they should. Ansoff did not reject emergent strategy. He confined it. The emergent model, he wrote, "is a valid prescription for organizations which seek to optimize their performance in environments in which strategic changes are incremental and the speed of the changes is slower than the speed of the organizational response." In turbulent environments, by contrast, firms that rely on it "endanger their own survival."

Mintzberg's rejoinder, "Learning 1, Planning 0" (1991), argued that Ansoff belonged to the planning school, not the design school, and dismissed the turbulence argument: "What we face is not turbulence but overinflated egos." Yet the same short reply conceded the central point: "We both know that we shall get nowhere without emergent learning alongside deliberate planning."

Without the polemic, the disagreement is narrower than its tone. Both men accepted a mix of planning and learning, and they differed over which should dominate when conditions change fast. For Ansoff, turbulence makes trial and error dangerous, because the organization cannot learn fast enough to survive its mistakes. For Mintzberg, turbulence makes forecasts unreliable, so plans go stale before they are carried out. Neither settled the question with evidence in this exchange. Ansoff cited an unpublished survey of his own. Mintzberg's main data point was Richard Pascale's (1984) account of Honda's entry into the US motorcycle market, a case whose interpretation has itself been disputed for decades.

Summary of the two positions. The "where it fits best" and "main risk" rows are this article's interpretation, not claims made by the original authors.

Porter's first Harvard Business Review article, "How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy," appeared in 1979, when he was, in the words of the editor's note to his 2008 restatement, "a young economist and associate professor." It brought into management a question from industrial-organization economics: why some industries earn persistently higher returns than others. Porter's answer was that managers define competition too narrowly. Competition for profits extends beyond today's rivals to four other forces: the threat of new entrants, the bargaining power of buyers and of suppliers, and the threat of substitutes.

The mechanism is easy to lose behind the familiar diagram. In Porter's 2008 formulation, industry structure determines long-run profit potential because it determines how the value an industry creates is divided: "how much is retained by companies in the industry versus bargained away by customers and suppliers, limited by substitutes, or constrained by potential new entrants." Each force is a claim on the same pool of value. Powerful buyers, typically concentrated ones buying in volume and facing low switching costs, push prices down or demand more for the same price. Powerful suppliers do the reverse with input costs. Substitutes, products meeting the same need in a different way, cap what customers will pay. Rivalry hurts most when it takes the form of price cutting, because price cuts transfer value to customers directly.

Entry is the least intuitive of the five. "It is the threat of entry, not whether entry actually occurs, that holds down profitability," Porter wrote. Incumbents facing a credible threat hold prices down or invest heavily to deter newcomers, so an industry can show no new entrants and still be disciplined by them. He listed seven sources of entry barriers: supply-side economies of scale, demand-side benefits of scale, customer switching costs, capital requirements, incumbency advantages independent of size, unequal access to distribution channels, and restrictive government policy.

The 2008 article is equally firm about what is not a force. Industry growth, technology, government and complementary products are "factors, not forces." A fast-growing industry is not automatically attractive: growth mutes rivalry but can hand power to suppliers and draw in entrants, and personal computers grew fast while being among the least profitable industries. Government, Porter argued, "is not best understood as a sixth force because government involvement is neither inherently good nor bad for industry profitability." Its influence should be traced through the forces it affects. Patents raise entry barriers, for example, while bankruptcy rules that keep failing firms alive sustain excess capacity and rivalry. Complements get the same treatment.

This is where the most serious alternative framework parts company. Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff (1995) proposed a "Value Net" that places complementors on the same footing as substitutors, customers and suppliers. Complementors, they wrote, are "often overlooked in traditional strategic analysis." The difference is one of emphasis, but emphasis directs attention. A manager using Porter's map asks who will take a share of the value. A manager using the Value Net also asks who could make the product more valuable, and how to bring them in.

Porter's own list of common pitfalls includes defining the industry too broadly or too narrowly, making lists instead of analyzing, and giving every force equal attention. Its final item describes the most frequent classroom error: "Using the framework to declare an industry attractive or unattractive rather than using it to guide strategic choices."

The facts in this section come from the dated press reports listed at the end of the article. The assessment of each force is this article's interpretation, not a finding reported by those sources.

Bangladesh had 191.09 million mobile subscriptions in August 2026, according to BTRC data reported by The Financial Express (24 September 2026). Grameenphone held about 45.6 percent, Robi 30.9 percent, Banglalink 19.9 percent and the state-owned Teletalk 3.6 percent. The industry shrank from six operators to four in 2016, when BTRC shut down Citycell over unpaid dues in October and Robi completed its merger with Airtel in November. Subscriber shares understate the asymmetry. In a January 2026 report on Telenor's Asian holdings, The Daily Star stated that Grameenphone generates nearly half of industry revenue and "accounts for 88 percent of sector profits."

Three points stand out, none of them a verdict that the industry is "attractive." The first is that the same five forces produce very different outcomes inside the industry. EBITDA margins cited in an April 2026 Daily Star report were about 60 percent for Grameenphone, 51.1 percent for Robi and 43 to 44 percent for Banglalink. A network business has high fixed costs, so the operator with the most subscribers on each tower and each megahertz earns the most. Industry analysis explains why the industry rewards scale. It does not explain how one firm came to have it.

The second is that government appears in every row: as supplier of spectrum, collector of taxes, setter of a price floor, licensor of towers and regulator of the leading firm. Porter's advice to trace government through the forces works, and the table follows it. But where the state shapes nearly every force at once, as it does in many emerging-economy industries, a manager who files it under "factors" risks treating the most important strategic relationship as background. Analyzing the regulator's own objectives, including revenue and competition, is part of the work.

The third concerns the boundaries of the industry. Under the licensing policy reported in September 2025, internet service providers move into the same "access network" licence category as mobile operators, and the old international gateway and exchange licences are to be phased out, mostly by 2027 (The Daily Star, 24 September 2025). Whether the relevant industry is "mobile telecom" or "connectivity" changes who counts as a rival, a substitute or a supplier, and Porter's first pitfall, defining the industry wrongly, becomes a live question.

The most direct empirical challenge came from Richard Rumelt (1991). Using US Federal Trade Commission data on business units in manufacturing, he split the variation in business-unit profitability into components. In the main sample, stable industry effects accounted for about 8 percent of the variance and stable business-unit effects for about 46 percent. In a larger sample that included small business units, the figures were about 4 and 44 percent. Corporate-parent effects were close to zero. "Business-units differ from one another within industries a great deal more than industries differ from one another," Rumelt concluded.

Anita McGahan and Porter (1997) replied with a broader sample of US businesses that included services. They attributed 2 percent of profit variance to year effects, 19 percent to industry, 4 percent to corporate parent and 32 percent to business-specific effects. Industry mattered less in manufacturing and more in lodging and entertainment, services, wholesale and retail trade, and transportation. Read together, the studies show that industry matters, more in some sectors than others, but that differences between firms within an industry are usually larger.

Both studies decompose variance and do not identify causes. A large "business-unit effect" says that a unit's profitability is persistently different from its industry's, not why. Some of that difference may reflect position within the industry, which is Porter's territory too: Grameenphone's margin advantage is a business-unit effect in the statistics and a scale position in the five forces. A large share of variance in both studies is unexplained, and both rest on US data. They are a warning against treating industry analysis as sufficient. They do not show it is unnecessary.

A second critique concerns platforms. Marshall Van Alstyne, Geoffrey Parker and Sangeet Paul Choudary (2016) argued that Porter's forces "still apply. But on platforms these forces behave differently, and new factors come into play." The five forces model "doesn't factor in network effects," and it treats outside forces as "depletive," extracting value from the firm. On a platform, more sellers attract more buyers and the reverse, so the same forces can be "accretive." Boundaries also move: "In platform businesses, those boundaries can shift rapidly," and participants "may turn on the platform and compete directly with it." The telecom case shows a version of this: the messaging apps that substitute for operators' voice service run on operators' data networks, so they are substitute and complement at once. A five forces table can record both roles but struggles to say which will dominate.

The third critique, that the analysis is static, Porter partly concedes, since "using static analysis that ignores industry trends" is on his own list of pitfalls. Where structure shifts quickly, the analysis has to be redone often enough to become the kind of continuing learning Mintzberg described. This article's judgment is that the five forces remain the clearest available explanation of why profit pools differ across established industries with recognizable boundaries, and a much weaker guide to where platform markets and converging industries are heading.

Knowing the forces still leaves the firm's own choice to be made. In "What Is Strategy?" (1996), Porter separated two sources of superior performance that managers routinely blur. "Operational effectiveness (OE) means performing similar activities better than rivals perform them": lower defects, faster processes, better use of inputs. It is necessary, but best practices spread quickly, and firms that compete only on operational effectiveness drift toward one another until competition becomes a contest of price cuts. Strategy is different in kind: "Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value."

Porter identified three bases for a position. Variety-based positioning serves a subset of an industry's products or services, as Southwest Airlines did with short-haul, point-to-point flights. Needs-based positioning serves most of the needs of a particular group of customers, as IKEA does for young buyers who want style at low cost and will assemble the furniture themselves. Access-based positioning serves customers who have similar needs but are reached differently, because of where they are or how many of them there are. These refine the generic strategies Porter had introduced earlier, cost leadership, differentiation and focus, which he still described in 1996 as useful "at the simplest and broadest level."

A position is sustainable only if it involves trade-offs, choices that make one activity incompatible with another. "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do." Porter's cautionary case was Continental Lite, Continental Airlines' attempt to match Southwest on some point-to-point routes while staying a full-service airline elsewhere. Lite fares could not support standard travel-agent commissions or full frequent-flier rewards, so Continental cut both across the whole airline, angering agents and full-service customers alike. "In trying to be low cost on some routes and full service on others, Continental paid an enormous straddling penalty." Positions are protected further by fit, the way activities reinforce one another, so that an imitator has to copy the whole system and not one visible practice.

Applied to the telecom table, the argument suggests where a follower might find room. With a regulated voice floor and four operators selling similar national coverage, headline price offers little space. Positions built on particular customer groups, places or services are more open, but each would require giving something up, and a proposed position that gives up nothing deserves suspicion.

Constructed teaching case. Karnaphuli Fibernet Ltd. is a fictional company, and all company figures, people and events below are hypothetical. The industry facts it refers to (internet subscription totals, the 2025 licensing policy, Starlink's pricing) are real and dated as given in the article.

Karnaphuli Fibernet is a home broadband provider in Chattogram with about 48,000 subscribers, most of them in apartment buildings where a dozen local providers compete for the same households. Packages are hard to tell apart, and two rivals cut prices by 15 percent last year. Karnaphuli buys its upstream bandwidth from a small number of transmission and gateway providers, and its gross margin on household connections has fallen for three years. Nationally, BTRC counted 137.66 million internet subscriptions in August 2026, of which 122.26 million were mobile, so mobile data is the substitute every household already has.

The board has also noticed something nobody planned. Over two years, the company's two most senior field engineers, answering requests passed on by friends, connected forty garment factories, clinics and warehouses in the Chattogram export zone area with dedicated lines and on-call repair. These business accounts now produce 22 percent of revenue and 41 percent of gross profit. No one decided to enter the business market; Karnaphuli is in it anyway. The managing director wants a positioning decision before the licensing changes take effect.

What the case is designed to show. There is no answer key, but the options are not equally well reasoned. The case puts the two halves of this article in the same room. Industry analysis explains why the household market is squeezing Karnaphuli: low entry barriers, a universal substitute and concentrated upstream suppliers. It does not, by itself, reveal the enterprise opportunity. That came from engineers responding to customers, the kind of emergent learning a formal planning cycle might have missed. A strong board discussion would ask whether the emergent business rests on a real position or on two people, which trade-offs each option demands, and what evidence would change its mind within a year.

The two traditions covered here are less opposed than their founders' exchanges suggest. Porter's framework explains where profit pools lie and why, and his account of positioning explains how a firm can claim part of one without being copied. Mintzberg's work explains how organizations actually arrive at their positions, often by noticing what they are already doing. Ansoff and Mintzberg ended their argument agreeing that planning and learning must coexist, and the telecom case shows why: a spectrum bid has to be planned, while a new service often has to be discovered.

What neither tradition settles is the organizational question underneath. An emergent strategy is only useful if someone with authority to commit resources sees it in time, and the people who see it first, such as engineers, salespeople or branch staff, are usually furthest from that authority. How an organization shortens that distance without turning every local experiment into a strategy is a question of structure, incentives and information flow as much as of strategic analysis.

Choose an industry in Bangladesh, or in another country you know well, and one firm competing in it. Banking, pharmaceuticals, cement, ready-made garments, telecom and e-commerce are all workable, but choose one where you can find dated, public evidence.

Prepare a report of 2,500 to 3,000 words that:

1. defines the boundaries of the industry, by product and geography, and explains why a broader or narrower definition would change the analysis;
2. analyzes the five forces with dated evidence, identifies the one or two forces that most shape profitability, and traces the effect of government policy and complements through the forces rather than listing them separately;
3. explains why firms within the industry perform differently, using the industry-versus-firm evidence discussed in this article;
4. evaluates your chosen firm's position, including the basis of the position (variety, needs or access), the trade-offs it has made or avoided, and how far its activities fit together;
5. assesses, from the public record, whether the firm's current strategy looks mainly deliberate or emergent, and what evidence supports that reading; and
6. recommends one strategic choice, stating its costs, risks and the evidence that would show it to be wrong.

Use at least five academic sources, including at least three from this article's reference list. Every factual claim about the industry or firm must be traceable to a dated source. Where evidence is unavailable, say so and explain how the gap limits your analysis. Do not estimate figures you cannot source.

Assessment rubric (100 marks)

1. Ansoff, H. I. (1991). Critique of Henry Mintzberg's "The design school: Reconsidering the basic premises of strategic management." Strategic Management Journal, 12(6), 449–461. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250120605
2. Brandenburger, A. M., & Nalebuff, B. J. (1995, July–August). The right game: Use game theory to shape strategy. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/1995/07/the-right-game-use-game-theory-to-shape-strategy
3. Liedtka, J. M. (1998). Strategic thinking: Can it be taught? Long Range Planning, 31(1), 120–129. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0024-6301(97)00098-8
4. McGahan, A. M., & Porter, M. E. (1997). How much does industry matter, really? Strategic Management Journal, 18(S1), 15–30. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-0266(199707)18:1+<15::AID-SMJ916>3.0.CO;2-1
5. Mintzberg, H. (1987). Crafting strategy. Harvard Business Review, 65(4), 66–75.
6. Mintzberg, H. (1990). The design school: Reconsidering the basic premises of strategic management. Strategic Management Journal, 11(3), 171–195. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250110302
7. Mintzberg, H. (1991). Learning 1, planning 0: Reply to Igor Ansoff. Strategic Management Journal, 12(6), 463–466. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250120606
8. Mintzberg, H. (1994). The fall and rise of strategic planning. Harvard Business Review, 72(1), 107–114. Adapted from Mintzberg, H. (1994), The rise and fall of strategic planning, Free Press and Prentice Hall International.
9. Pascale, R. T. (1984). Perspectives on strategy: The real story behind Honda's success. California Management Review, 26(3), 47–72. https://doi.org/10.2307/41165080
10. Porter, M. E. (1996). What is strategy? Harvard Business Review, 74(6), 61–78.
11. Porter, M. E. (2008). The five competitive forces that shape strategy. Harvard Business Review, 86(1), 78–93. (Restates and extends Porter, M. E. (1979), How competitive forces shape strategy, Harvard Business Review, 57(2), 137–145.)
12. Rumelt, R. P. (1991). How much does industry matter? Strategic Management Journal, 12(3), 167–185. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250120302
13. Van Alstyne, M. W., Parker, G. G., & Choudary, S. P. (2016, April). Pipelines, platforms, and the new rules of strategy. Harvard Business Review, 94(4). https://hbr.org/2016/04/pipelines-platforms-and-the-new-rules-of-strategy

News sources for the Bangladesh telecom section

• "Mobile subscriptions go up by 0.65m in Aug." The Financial Express, 24 September 2026. Link
• "BTRC suspends CityCell's spectrum." The Daily Star, 20 October 2016. Link
• "Robi, Airtel complete merger." The Daily Star, 16 November 2016. Link
• "4 companies awarded mobile tower sharing licence." Prothom Alo English, 2 November 2018. Link
• "Grameenphone named significant market power." The Daily Star, 10 February 2019. Link
• "First SMP restrictions come into effect after nine years." The Daily Star, 30 June 2020. Link
• "Apps spell doom for int'l call operators." The Daily Star, 1 April 2021. Link
• "Mobile operators buy Tk 10,645cr spectrum." The Daily Star, 31 March 2022. Link
• "Starlink launches with starting price of Tk 4,200 a month." The Daily Star, 20 May 2025. Link
• "Robi breaks ground with first 5G launch, GP rushes to follow hours later." The Financial Express, 2 September 2025. Link
• "New telecom policy trims licensing categories to four." The Daily Star, 24 September 2025. Link
• "HC stays SMP curbs on GP for three months." The Daily Star, 22 December 2025. Link
• "Govt earns Tk 2,370cr as Grameenphone bags 700 MHz spectrum." The Daily Star, 21 January 2026. Link
• "Telenor shrinks Asian footprint, puts GP in spotlight." The Daily Star, 27 January 2026. Link
• "Legal fights heat up telecom sector." The Daily Star, 19 February 2026. Link
• "Telecom experts call for abolishing voice floor price." The Daily Star, 6 April 2026. Link

Notes on sources. Liedtka's five elements were confirmed through papers citing her article; the original was not accessible. Pascale (1984) is cited only for the existence of his Honda account, which was checked through its abstract and later discussion. McGahan and Porter's figures are taken from the article's abstract. BTRC figures are cited as reported in the press because BTRC's own site could not be reached. The Karnaphuli Fibernet case, the force assessments in the telecom table, the comparison table in Section 3 and the diagnostic are original teaching material for this series, not findings reported by the sources above.

Next in The Human Capital MBA series: Article 07, continuing Module 02 (Strategic Management).