TABLE OF CONTENTS The inner workings of Your Company, Inc. have changed as well. Strategic planning has been institutionalized. It is an ongoing process that keeps track of all of the activities going on within the company.
The world s interconnectedness has made access to people and information as easy as a mouse click. The emergence and maturation of the Internet have provided immense opportunities to tie businesses together and have allowed firms to gain exposure to customers and markets that they could have only dreamed about penetrating in the past.
Couple this phenomenon with the emergence of the pay as you go attitude that many Best Practices Enterprises are adopting through outsourcing models that redefine assumptions about fixed and variable cost structures and capital investments, and one can see that a different way of strategic thinking and planning is needed for ongoing success in the 21st century.
Put simply, most organizations are ill-prepared for the competitive demands that lie ahead, and they lack the discipline and rigor needed to identify, organize, and execute the appropriate work in any sustainable way. Without an advanced way of planning and orchestrating strategic direction-setting, firms will continue to flounder in the new age. For this reason, Program-Centric Strategic Planning is the first best practices program that we will examine (see Figure 3.1). It sets the stage for the other best practices programs that follow later in the book.
