Strategic Planning’s unplanned troubles.

"Strategic planning ran into trouble in the early 1980's when the activity was cut back in many companies. Most dramatic was the emasculation at General Electric, the company that 'literally wrote the book on the subject' (Potts, 1984).

Business Week documented the troubles in a cover story of 17 September, 1984. 'After more than a decade of near dictatorial sway over the future of US corporations, the reign of the strategic planner may be at the end,' the magazine exclaimed '....few of the supposedly brilliant strategies concocted by planners were successfully implemented.' To Business Week the upheaval was 'nothing less' than 'a bloody battle between planners and managers' (1984: 62). The General Electric story dominated the article, as it had the lore of strategic planning almost from the very beginning.

As Business Week told this story, in the early 1980's soon after he became Chairman and CEO, Jack Welch dismantled the strategic planning system.....

In the rise and fall of strategic planning, from which this chapter draws, Mintzberg (1994) documented the evidence that piled up against the process, including stories in the popular press and empirical findings from the research, which contained a long string of studies that set out to prove that strategic planning pays but never did." pp. 68-69.

"Most corporate strategic plans have little to do with strategy. They are simply three-year or five-year rolling resources budgets and some sort of market share projection. Calling this strtegic planning creates false expectations that the exercise will somehow produce a coherent strategy.....we conclude that strategic planning has been misnamed. It should be called strategic programming. And it should be promoted as a process to formalize, where necessary, the consequences of strategies already developed by other means. Ultimately, the term 'strategic planning' has proved to be an oxymoron" p.82. "There is however no need to throw out the strategic planner baby with the strategic planning bathwater. Planners have important roles to play around the black box of strategy formation, if not within it." p.83.

Mintzberg, H., Ahlstrand, B., Lampel, J., 2009, Strategy Safari, London: FT Prentice Hall.