Best Practices in Planning and Performance Management: Radically Rethinking Management for a Volatile World, Third Edition

Chapter 5. Strategic Planning: Ideas That Drive Results

	By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
	--Benjamin Franklin

Strategic planning has at various times been seen as the single most critical task in business and been ridiculed as an impediment to innovation and a constrainton execution. Formalized strategic planning reached its zenith in the two decades following World War II. The power of large-scale, formal planning processes was demonstrated by the spectacular success of the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. This event, coupled with the remarkable transformation the U.S. economy was able to make in mobilizing for war in 1942 and then reverting back to peacetime operation in 1945-1946, brought planning to the forefront of management's attention and provided a powerful impetus for the creation of strategic planning teams within corporations.

The World War II experience of General Motors illustrates the scale of this transformation. Today General Motors is often cited as an example of all that has gone wrong with American industry since the 1960s; however, for 30 years, GM was the largest and most successful company in the world—it was Google, Wal-Mart, and Toyota all rolled into one. As discussed in Chapter 4, the architect of GM's rise was Alfred P. Sloan, who became president of GM in 1923 and eventually retired in 1956. During his tenure, strategic planning in general and scenario planning in particular were still largely military planning tools, yet ...