Introduction
Rational planning plays a critical role in the organizational success. Through rational planning, it is possible for managers of a company to come up with a realistic and executable organizational strategy. Different schools of thought exist that explain the process of strategy formation in a business. For example, in the design school, strategy formation is viewed as a process of organizational conception. In the planning school, strategy formation is interpreted as a formal process. In contrast, the positioning school is based on the assumption that strategy formation is an analytical process. Nevertheless, these theoretical strands share one characteristic: they all emphasize the importance of a strategy for the success of an organization. Differences arise only in regards to the process of coming up with the ideal strategy.
According to Mankins (2008), strategic planning in most business organizations no longer seems to matter. Mankins (2008) adds that the process is normally time-consuming and produces reams of data, but it rarely drives the decisions of top management or the overall strategy of the company. Based on Mankins’ observation, it seems that many companies have failed to propagate a link between rational planning and the actual development of an organization’s strategy. This paper provides a critical evaluation of rational planning as an appropriate way of developing a strategy for an organization.
Rational planning as a formal process of developing organizational strategy
The planning school views strategy formation in an organization as a formal process. During the 1970s, numerous publications emphasizing the importance of planning emerged in both the academic world and in popular business press. They addressed issues relating to the need for managers to adopt a formal approach in planning the future of their organizations. In these discussions, it was widely assumed that if the planning process was undertaken in the right way, an organization could end up entrench the ideal …
References
Campbell, D, Edgar, D & Stonehouse, G (2011), Business Strategy: An Introduction, Palgrave, Basingstoke.
Grant, R (2008), Contemporary Strategy Analysis (6th Edition), Blackwell Publishing, Oxford.
Henry, A (2011), Understanding Strategic Management (2nd Edition), Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Lynch, R (2009), Corporate Strategy (5th Edition), Financial Times Prentice Hall, London.
Mankins, M (2008), How the best divest, Harvard Business Review, Boston, June, 2008.
Mintzberg, H, Ahlstrand, J & Lampel, J (1998), Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through the Wilds of Strategic Management, Simon & Schuster, New York.
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