Strategic Planing
tompeters!
Strategic Planning, R.I.P.
TOM PETERS enry Mintzberg has killed strategic planning.
It’s not that the prolific McGill University professor has anything new to say in his justreleased book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic
Planning. And it’s not as if our mindless love affair with planning in the 1960s and 1970s didn’t effectively end a dozen years ago (when then-neophyte GE chairman Jack
Welch killed his corporation’s hyper-formalized planning system, and most of the planners along with it). It’s just that this academic yet sprightly text is, well, so encyclopedic, so damning ... and so final. It puts the last nails in the coffin; it closes, decisively, a major chapter of the American management saga. The dead horse need not be beaten again.
My own reading of the book consumed (correct word) a plane trip to London, a full night in New Delhi, then two more dusk-to-dawn stints in Dubai. The catharsis was profound. From time to time I’d even find myself sweating, despite a chill air conditioning which kept me under blankets.
“So far so bad,” proclaimed the renowned political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, in 1973, of the elaborate planning processes introduced into the public sector by Robert (bodycount Bob) McNamara when he was U.S. Secretary of
Defense.
Others went farther. “A good deal of corporate planning ... is like a ritual rain dance,” wrote Dartmouth’s Brian Quinn.
“It has no effect on the weather that follows, but those who engage in it think it does. ... Moreover, much of the advice related to corporate planning is directed at improving the dancing, not the weather.” Columbia’s Len Sayles chimed in,
“Apparently our society, not unlike the Greeks with their
Delphic oracles, takes great comfort in believing that very talented ‘seers’ removed from the hurly-burly world of reality can foretell coming events.” Two other observers, M.L. Gimpl and S.R. Dakin, added, “Management’s enchantment with the magic of long-range
Strategic Planning, R.I.P.
TOM PETERS enry Mintzberg has killed strategic planning.
It’s not that the prolific McGill University professor has anything new to say in his justreleased book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic
Planning. And it’s not as if our mindless love affair with planning in the 1960s and 1970s didn’t effectively end a dozen years ago (when then-neophyte GE chairman Jack
Welch killed his corporation’s hyper-formalized planning system, and most of the planners along with it). It’s just that this academic yet sprightly text is, well, so encyclopedic, so damning ... and so final. It puts the last nails in the coffin; it closes, decisively, a major chapter of the American management saga. The dead horse need not be beaten again.
My own reading of the book consumed (correct word) a plane trip to London, a full night in New Delhi, then two more dusk-to-dawn stints in Dubai. The catharsis was profound. From time to time I’d even find myself sweating, despite a chill air conditioning which kept me under blankets.
“So far so bad,” proclaimed the renowned political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, in 1973, of the elaborate planning processes introduced into the public sector by Robert (bodycount Bob) McNamara when he was U.S. Secretary of
Defense.
Others went farther. “A good deal of corporate planning ... is like a ritual rain dance,” wrote Dartmouth’s Brian Quinn.
“It has no effect on the weather that follows, but those who engage in it think it does. ... Moreover, much of the advice related to corporate planning is directed at improving the dancing, not the weather.” Columbia’s Len Sayles chimed in,
“Apparently our society, not unlike the Greeks with their
Delphic oracles, takes great comfort in believing that very talented ‘seers’ removed from the hurly-burly world of reality can foretell coming events.” Two other observers, M.L. Gimpl and S.R. Dakin, added, “Management’s enchantment with the magic of long-range