Lack of preparation is every manager's nightmare.
Do you find yourself needing to get up to speed on a particular subject in time for an important meeting or event? Are you struggling to find both the time and the patience to track down the most appropriate material?
Then look no further than Emerald Management Briefings! Management Briefings provide you with a detailed insight into your chosen topic and comprise up to six specially-selected articles from the 40,000-strong Emerald Fulltext article database which is selected by 98% of the world's 100 top business schools as listed by the Financial Times.
Not sure what to expect? Have a look at this sample of an Emerald Fulltext article to find out.
You will need the Adobe Acrobat reader to view this article and to view our Management Briefings.
After a period of being considered relatively unfashionable, strategic planning is now making a comeback on a large scale.
This form of scheduling was consistently used in the 1960s but fell out of favour in the 80s as quality strategy became the key feature. The past decade has seen the re-emergence of strategic planning and, despite some opposition, it is now widely recognized that this is fundamental to the success of your organization.
But first of all we must ask what exactly is strategic planning? What are its key implications? How in-depth or far ahead do you need to plan? And, crucially, how can you ensure that your business plan is triumphant? Needless to say, there is much that has evolved since the 1960s. Times have changed, organizations expanded and entities such as e-commerce and globalization have come to the fore.
"If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up someplace else."
- Yogi Bera
Mike Freedman describes strategy as the "framework in which choices are made about the future nature and direction of an organization" thus implying that the whole company must be in accordance with a strategy. It is no longer considered effective for a CEO to formulate a plan in isolation and simply roll it out to employees, for in order to set realistic targets, input is needed from the whole organization. As regards planning, it is important to distinguish between this and decision-making. A good business will only make decisions for the present because whilst we can anticipate the future, we cannot guarantee anything. In this sense, flexibility is the key.
This sentiment also holds true regarding innovation, for it has been suggested that long term planning stifles any innovative tendencies and encourages mere repetitions of other strategies performed by other organizations. Whilst there is something to be said for learning from the experiences of others, originality is a key factor in business success, and flexibility is inextricably linked to this concept.
Similarly, there are no hard and fast rules for how far in advance you choose to plan, as long as you are prepared to remain open to change and remember that essential differentiation; planning is not deciding.
Illustrated above are just some of the factors which contribute to the success of a business plan. Follow the pointers in our Briefing in order to formulate, test and implement your own innovative and effective tactical plan.
Articles:
Discovering significant and viable new businesses: have faith in strategic planning basics
Ashridge Strategic Management Centre has developed a screening tool – The New Businesses Traffic Lights - to test opportunities before a business plan has been developed, alongside a business plan to assess the strategic logic for the proposal, or to an existing investment that is failing to meet its short-term targets.
Originally published in Strategy & Leadership
Volume 33 Number 1, 2005
Strategic planning using QFD
This paper outlines the use of quality function deployment (QFD) for strategic planning. QFD provides a comprehensive process for defining the issues facing an organisation in terms of customer and stakeholder outcomes, natural segments and key strategic opportunities.
Originally published International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management
Volume 22 Number 1, 2005
Freshening up strategic planning: more than fill-in-the-blanks
Strategy development has become an often haphazard process decoupled from annual resource allocation and planning. Sometimes, it is even overlooked entirely. It is all too common to see the budgeting process driving the strategy, one year at a time. Many companies need to reestablish their basic approaches to strategy development and create explicit mechanisms to link the resulting strategy to execution.
Originally published in the Journal of Business Strategy
Volume 24 Number 6, 2003
A driving force: an analysis of strategic planning in the Canadian automotive industry
This paper investigated the impact of components and contextual elements of strategic planning on the effectiveness of the strategic planning process. Specifically, the characteristics of planning and the overall effectiveness of planning processes in the automotive industry were studied.
Originally published in Business Process Management Journal
Volume 9 Number 4, 2003
The role of strategic planning in the performance of small, professional service firms: A research note
Using a sample of small, regional professional service firms, this paper investigates relationships between firm performance and aspects of strategic planning.
Originally published in the Journal of Management Development
Volume 23 Number 8, 2004
Organizational mechanisms for successful IS/IT strategic planning in the digital era
As e-business strategies have received growing attention from entrepreneurs, executives, investors and industry, information systems (IS)/information technology (IT) strategic planning has progressively come to be considered a critical method for developing a successful e-strategy.
Originally published in Management Decision
Volume 41 Number 1, 2003
Emerald Management Briefings are delivered as bookmarked PDFs for your convenience.
