The environmental school looks at how external issues affect strategy formation.
So far, the schools that we’ve examined have focused on a particular area as a way to formulate strategy, such as culture, planning and managerial vision. The environmental school is different, in that it takes a huge step back to look at the entire situation in which a company is situated.For the environmental school, external forces are not a factor in strategy formation, they are the factor. The environmental school makes a conscious effort to remove all choice from their strategy. Instead they simply let their environment shape the strategy.Management, then, is constantly on the lookout for changes that occur, making small course adjustments or adapting in order to manage the specifics of new environments.So what do they consider to be “the environment”? In essence, the environment is all things external to the company, such as stability, complexity, market diversity and hostility, and so on.No one can or should deny that environment is an important factor to consider when formulating management strategy. But it can’t be the only thing you consider! For example, the environment alone can’t explain how two organizations can be successful in the same environment with totally different strategies.What’s more, the environmental school has no agency. By seeing companies as being mere puppets of their respective environments, the environmental school removes all choice from the organization So far we’ve seen a good selection of both prescriptive strategies, whereby the plan informs the action, and descriptive strategies, in which circumstances inform action. The rest of the sumarry we will look at strategies that successfully combine these two seemingly contradictory ideas.