Strategic planning

“Wicked” problems can’t be solved, but they can be tamed. Increasingly, these are the problems strategists face—and for which they are ill equipped.

Wachovia has a long-term goal to build customer equity and short-term decisions to make on how to allocate marketing resources. Until recently, it had no way to connect the two.

Recent headlines — Citigroup’s layoffs, Iceland’s sudden downturn, worldwide food shortages, etc. — suggest serious global turmoil is ahead. All companies, and multinationals in particular, should be prepared to withstand it. Unfortunately, many are not. Traditional forecasting and budgeting systems produce linear projections insufficient for risky, uncertain times. What’s needed is scenario planning, where companies […]

Smart firms can learn to distinguish what type of work leads to big profits — and what doesn’t.

On my first visit to Samsung’s Suwon complex, the headquarters of the company’s electronics and appliance division was even more Third World than I expected. The factory floors were bare concrete. People hand-wheeled parts to and from the production line. The research lab reminded me of a dilapidated high-school science classroom. But the work going […]

In recent years a growing number of companies have expended considerable amounts of time and money to develop strategic planning skills in their profit centers and at higher organizational levels. We applaud this effort, but as we stand back and observe large and small companies alike apply this new talent and expertise, we are struck […]

The regularity of the growth cycles of living organisms has always fascinated thoughtful he observers regularity and of has the invited growth a cycles variety of living attempts to apply the same principles—of a predictable sequence of rapid growth followed by maturation, decline, and death—to companies and selected industries. One such concept, known as the […]

Drawing on a rich set of company examples, Thomas H. Davenport, a professor at the University of Texas's Graduate School of Business, provides a fresh,...

Many American companies have begun to plan for their professional, managerial, and technical personnel. The most critical element is management's appreciation...

This short quiz can gauge how committed your company really is.

In this sequel to their well-received earlier collaboration for HBR, “Strategic Planning in Diversified Companies” (January–February 1975), Peter Lorange and Richard F. Vancil take the reader through the steps necessary to implement and carry forward a formal strategic planning effort. They identify six issues that top management has to deal with along the way: communication […]

Business has gone through a dramatic transformation in recent years. So has warfare. Every executive knows firsthand the daunting challenges of the twenty-first-century business environment: rapid and disruptive change, fleeting opportunities, incomplete information, an overall sense of uncertainty and disorder. While military commanders have long faced such challenges on the battlefield, meeting them has be […]

It is hard to believe but yes, 2009 is winding down. Thanksgiving is around the corner, the holiday rush is almost palpable, and before you know it we’ll be watching our TV screens for the ball to drop in Times Square. It is about this time of year that many businesses begin to feel the […]

Make your strategy process a design process.

Ethical considerations aside, U.S. companies damage their long-term business interests when they turn a blind eye to the "dirty money" that flows through...

For many years, I’ve been studying and researching how companies can drive organic growth and innovation. An argument that is central to this line of work is that one needs to use different disciplines when operating in an environment in which one has to make many more assumptions than one has knowledge (see McGrath RG, […]

People make strategy much harder than it needs to be. For some, the problem is that they focus too much on the tools: environmental scans, SWOT analyses, customer analyses, competitor analyses, financial modeling, and so on. Other people get into trouble because they think it’s all about the broad, conceptual, future-oriented, big picture stuff — […]

The U.S. Navy operates on the front lines of climate change. It manages tens of billions of dollars of assets on every continent and on every ocean, which...

In the near future, carbon won’t be free. Governments are about to tax it. Retailers are looking to communicate it on product labels. Consumers have started to make purchase decisions based on its presence in products. Business customers will demand visibility into the way it’s used in their supply chains. These trends will drive new […]

Businesses hoping to survive over the long term will have to remake themselves into better competitors at least once along the way. These efforts have...