Planeacion Estrategica

AUGUST 26, 1996

Strategic Planning: It's Back!
After a decade of gritty downsizing, Big Thinkers are back in corporate vogue

He was in his mid-20s and had never made a product, run a business, or managed an employee. But he was armed with a Harvard University MBA and a power suit, and he had a magic talisman: He was a consultant at one of the hottest strategy boutiques of the 1970s. Andafter he completed a presentation on Boston Consulting Group Inc.'s strategic ideas at a major U.S. company, the young consultant got his due when the board of directors erupted into enthusiastic applause. Those were heady times, recalls John Clarkeson, the young MBA who joined BCG from Harvard in 1966 and is now its chief executive. In its heyday, strategy-spinning was the ultimate leftbrainexercise for the corporate elite. Thousands of B-schooltrained thinkers sat high in the climate-controlled aeries of bloated business empires, crunching numbers and spinning scenarios to conquer adversaries. The popularity of corporate strategy spawned a mini-industry of brainy consulting boutiques, and nearly every CEO worth his perks learned how to sort out his business by cows, dogs, stars, andquestion marks. Everything could be categorized, analyzed, quantified, and predicted. You could plot a strategy that would safely steer your company to uninterrupted triumph if only you thought hard enough. Or maybe not. 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 amore 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. But here's a funny thing. After more than a decade of shrinking to hike productivity and efficiency, companies are now eager to wring more profits out of those streamlined operations. Sowhat's making a comeback? You guessed it: strategic planning. 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. Reengineering consultants with stopwatches are out. Strategy gurus with visions of new prospects are in. "The pure efficiency approach did very little to generate distinctive competitiveadvantages," says Dwight Gertz, a consultant at Mercer Management Consulting Inc., which says its growth-strategy business has nearly doubled in the first half of the year. At one company after another--from Sears to IBM to Hewlett-Packard to Searle, strategy is again a major focus in the quest for higher revenues and profits. With help from a new generation of business strategists, companies are pursuingnovel ways to hatch new products, expand existing businesses, and create the markets of tomorrow. Some companies are even recreating full-fledged strategic-planning groups. United Parcel

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Service expects to spin out a new strategy group from its marketing department, where strategic plans are now hatched. Explains Chairman Kent C. Nelson: "Because we're making bigger bets oninvestments in technology, we can't afford to spend a whole lot of money in one direction and then find out five years later it was the wrong direction." "REBOUND." Many mainstream consulting firms, including onetime strategy leader BCG, say their strategy business is booming. Meanwhile, a new wave of gurus and consulting firms has emerged with a wide assortment of perspectives and tools forcompanies to create strategy. A recent study by the Association of Management Consulting Firms found that executives, consultants, and B-school professors all agree that business strategy is now the single most important management issue and will remain so for the next five years. "We are seeing strategy make a rebound," says Vijay Govindarajan, a well-known strategy professor at Dartmouth College's...