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Planning Doesn’t Have to Be the Enemy of Agile

Harvard Business Review

Henry Mintzberg defined strategic planning as “a formalized system for codifying, elaborating and operationalizing the strategies which companies already have.” Consider the Dutch financial services firm ING Bank. It restructured its operations in the Netherlands by reorganizing 3,500 employees into agile squads.

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When to Decentralize Decision Making, and When Not To

Harvard Business Review

As Henry Mintzberg noted in The Structuring of Organizations in 1979, “The words centralization and decentralization have been bandied about for as long as anyone has cared to write about organizations.” Different operating units often have a common need for which the solutions can be (nearly) identical (e.g.,