Huh? Such was the title of a Wall Street Journal "Theory & Practice" article that ran on January 25, 2010. I was immediately intrigued as I am a big believer that strategic drift and failures to plan are business killers. Just yesterday I wrote about how Toyota got slammed because it pursued aggressive growth without thinking through how best to prepare its organization to support such growth. What was up with this article? Was the WSJ handing ammunition to iintellectually lazy executives to use as an excuse for their failure to plan?
A close reading of the article settled my fears. In fact it gave me hope and buttressed my beliefs. The companies it highlighted had not abandoned strategic planning; rather, they were doing it with more frequency and intensity than ever before in order to stay nimble in a tough, ever changing economy. What are dead, according to the article, are the static, long-term plans that some companies slog through once a year to then collect dust until it is time to slog through them again. No surprise there.
The article featured Office Depot which moved to monthly rather than quarterly planning reviews so that the office supply store could react faster to changes in customer needs. Also highlighted was a company called Spartan Motors that updates its three-year plan every month, a process that has allowed it to capture opportunities it otherwise might have missed. There are the requisite quotes from Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey consultants who have, respectively, coined the terms "adaptive strategies" and "just-in-time" decision making.
Unless I am missing something, strategy and planning is becoming ever more important in a dynamic competitive environment. If top companies are applying intellectual horsepower to strategic issues on a monthly basis, what happens to those companies that don't even think strategically and plan? Nothing great.
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