Strategy

[pic]

Top of Form

advanced search

[pic][pic]

Bottom of Form

Top of Form

[pic]

[pic][pic]

• Welcome, istrydom@iafrica.com

• Log Out

• My Profile

• Member Center

• About Us

• Help

• Member Edition

• 14 September 2008

Skip Navigation

Functions

Corporate Finance

Economic Studies

Governance

Information Technology

Marketing

Operations

Organization

Risk

Strategy

Alliances

Globalization

Growth

Innovation

Strategic Thinking

Strategy in Practice

Industries

Automotive

Energy, Resources, Materials

Financial Services

Food & Agriculture

Health Care

High Tech

Media & Entertainment

Nonprofit

Public Sector

Retail & Consumer Goods

Telecommunications

Transportation

Home » Strategy » Strategic Thinking

Tired of strategic planning?

Many companies get little value from their annual strategic-planning process. It should be redesigned to support real-time strategy making and to encourage ’creative accidents.’

Eric D. Beinhocker and Sarah Kaplan

June 2002

[pic][pic]' . . . chance favors only the prepared mind.'

—Louis Pasteur

Senior executives generally agree that crafting strategy is one of the most important parts of their job. As a result, most companies invest significant time and effort in a formal, annual strategic-planning process that typically culminates in a series of business unit and corporate strategy reviews with the CEO and the top management team. Yet the extraordinary reality is that few executives think this time-consuming process pays off, and many CEOs complain that their strategic-planning process yields few new ideas and is often fraught with politics.

Why the mismatch between effort and result? Evidence we culled from research on the planning processes at 30 companies (see sidebar, "About the research") and work with more than 50 additional companies points to a common dispiriting explanation: the annual strategy review frequently amounts to little more than a stage on which...