Strategic Planning
...on, deciding what you want the business to look like in three to five years, recognizing your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and lastly mapping out a course in which to take the company from its current to its desired position (Policastro). Strategic planning has historically been taken care of by top management every one to ten years. A little history; “by the early 1980s, as U.S. companies found themselves battered by global competitors and more nimble entrepreneurs, the cerebral strategizing of the past looked like a luxury of a more leisurely era. Suddenly, Corporate America was frantically struggling to catch up. Instead of weaving elegant stratagems, companies were scrambling to improve quality, restructure, downsize, and reengineer” (Byrne). But today strategic planning is making a comeback, “suddenly, the idea of rising above the tumult of day-to-day business to ponder the future of markets and competitors is looking attractive again”(Byrne). But the negative belief that strategic planning is obsolete because of the fast changing environment does make a valid point. That is why companies are beginning to break the strategic planning of a company down and replace it with ‘dynamic’ strategic planning. An example of this new dynamic strategic planning process would be General Electric’s destruction of its strategic planning department by its cut of 99% (Connie). But instead of this being the deathblow of GE’s planning department it created a training center to “train thousands of managers in a more dynamic strategic planning process and decision-making”(Connie). “Executives become visionary and transformational on the one hand and managers of strategic context on the other. Managing this context includes training others in strategic thinking to increase the collective capacity of the organization to make strategic decisions, its strategic IQ. In other words, in dynamic strategic planning processes, k...
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by kdmoneymaker