The Fall And Rise Of Strategic Planning

The fall and rise of strategic planning
When strategic planning arrived on the scene in the mid-1960s, corporate leaders embraced it as “the one best way” to devise and implement strategies thatwould enhance the competitiveness of each business unit. True to the scientific management pioneered by Frederick Taylor, this one best way involved separating thinking from doing and creating a newfunction staffed by specialist: strategic planners. Planning systems were expected to produce the best strategies as well as step-by-step instructions for carrying out those strategies so that the doers.The managers of businesses could not get them wrong. As we now know, planning has not exactly worked out that way.
While certainly nod dead, strategic planning has long since fallen from itspedestal. But even now, few people fully understand the reason: strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Indeed, strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse realvision with the manipulation of numbers. And this confusion lies at the heart of the issue: the most successful strategies are visions, not plans.
Strategic planning, as it has been practiced, has reallybeen strategic programming, the articulation an elaboration of strategies, or visions, that already exist. When companies understand the difference between planning and strategic thinking, they canget back to what the strategy-making process should be: capturing what the manager learns from all sources (both the soft insights from his or her personal experiences and the experiences of othersthroughout the organization and the hard data form market research and the like) and then synthesizing that learning into a vision of the direction that the business should pursue.
Organizationsdisenchanted with strategic planning should not get rid of their planners or conclude that there is no need for programming. Rather, organizations should transform the conventional planning job. Planners...