Limits to Strategic Planning
Strategic and Tactical Planning For thirteen years, I was a corporate economist and a corporate planner manager for three Fortune 500 companies. I discovered that I could do my job as a corporate economist while ignoring all but the simplest of economic concepts. As a corporate planner, I learned that the planning processes of large corporations were, at best, mostly a waste of time and resources, and at worst, contributed to the relative demise of the companies. Of the three companies I worked for, one has been sold three times, one has gone through a bankruptcy, and the other merged with (actually sold to) A Brazilian company. This is becoming typical; the failure rate of large corporations is accelerating. Other disciplines in business are no better. Marketing is still based on ideas, usually summarized by the four P’s, that are a formula for stagnation at best and decline at worst. Mass-media advertising, born at the beginn...