Strategic Planning, Theoretical Discussion

Since the mid sixties when strategic planning as a concept was introduced to the business and academic world, it’s repeatedly appears at academic literature. A theoretical discussion on how to conduct strategic planning evolve into empirical research, which mostly deals with strategic planning in large businesses and in part with small businesses. Significant share of the empirical research on strategic planning, both on large and small business, deals with the effect of strategic planning on the level of business performance. This article is the first in a series of articles covering variety of aspects of strategic planning and its goal is to enhance the ability to understand, what is strategic planning? This will be done through a literature review of books and articles, from the early decades in which the theoretical and practicable discussion on the concept of strategic planning has developed.

Drucker (1973) define the major role of planning in his book – “planning of, what is our business? What it will be? And what should it be? Must be combined …. Everything that we plan turns immediately into action and commitment”. Kallman and Shapiro (1978) define an array of processes which consolidate into strategic planning – analyzing the organization, setting its goals, understanding its abilities, define alternatives for implementing and achieving the goals, assessing the effectiveness of the alternatives, choose the preferable alternative, engage with the necessary operation in order to implement the alternative, keeping constant watch on the organization in order to reach optimal ratio between planning and implementation. Van de Ven (1980) claims that planning is a process or an array of operations used for developing a new product or service. Kudla (1980) argue that strategic planning is a systematic process underlie the decision about the firm goals and objectives for at least three years ahead and strategies’ development that control the resources usage for achieving these goals. Pearce, Freeman and Robinson (1987) define strategic planning as a process that determine – mission, goals, strategies, and the policy for acquiring and allocating the resources for achieving the organization goals. Ansoff (1991) argue that planning usually result in a better economic outcomes then learning through trial and error. Mintzberg (1994) wrote that the expectation from strategic planning at the first years it become a common concept was to create the best strategies coincident with specific step by step instructions of how to implement these strategies so the firm managers wont be mistaken. Mintzberg claims that planning could be implemented in a manner of exaggeration, inaccuracy and inefficiency. Miller and Cardinal (1994) note that despite the common agreement that strategic planning brings a better outcomes then coincidental managerial processes that don’t based on planning, some scholars claims that strategic planning could lead to dysfunction or irrelevance, in part due to overly rigid implementation.