Strategic Planning In Every Business example essay topic

Strategic planning is defined by intestorwords. com as the process of determining a company's long-term goals and then identifying the best approach for achieving those goals. But this definition is too broad and does not identify the true advantages of strategic planning for large to small businesses. Strategic planning provides the foundation for the policies, procedures, and strategies for obtaining and using resources to obtain the goals of the organization. Some believe that in today's rapidly changing environment, strategic planning is becoming more difficult and therefore more obsolete because changes are occurring so fast that plans-even those set for just months into the future-may soon be obsolete. The fact is that with the fast changing environment it is even more important to have strategic planning in every business today.

First to fully define what strategic planning involves; assessing the current business environment, defining your company's purpose mission, 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 (Poli castro). Strategic planning has historically been taken care of by top management every one to ten years. A little history; "by the early 1980's, 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 re engineer" (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 But the negative belief that strategic planning is obsolete because of the fast changing environment does make a valid point.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's 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, key employees learn how to think more and more like a CEO in terms of static strategic planning, thus matching strengths and weaknesses with opportunities and threats. They learn to increase their strategic intelligence by learning from their competitors, customers and suppliers to ask strategic questions, to plan for contingencies, and to engage in scenario planning" (Connie). The formal definition of strategic planning has remained constant since its creation. Yet the only constant in its implementation, business meaning, and ultimately its usefulness has been change. The ultimate usefulness for strategic planning, whether it be a small business or a large corporation like GE, can only be fully understood if implemented properly for that type of business.

The end product in any plan should be to accomplish the goals, not day-to-day, but years from now, and the only way to do that is to create and implement strategic planning, whether it being dynamic or 'old fashioned'.

Bibliography

Byrne, John A. Strategic Planning. New York. web Michael L. Introduction to Strategic Planning. U.S. Small Business Administration. web James, Ph. D. Increasing the Firm's Strategic IQ. web.