Chapter List

Overview

Throughout this book the aim has been to present strategic management at both a conceptual and a practical level. In order to make sense the practical implications have been restricted to the particular aspect of planning which was under discussion. It is now time to leave the discussion of individual components and to look again at the complete process. The next chapters are very much a continuation of the first three, which also examined corporate planning from a holistic viewpoint.

This and the following chapters deal solely with practicalities. In this chapter are presented some thoughts on the problem of introducing strategic management into an organisation. Some problems will still remain, and these will be discussed in the next chapter, which draws heavily on the published surveys of planning in practice.

I think it is true to say that many attempts at introducing strategic management have been doomed to fail from the outset simply because too little forethought was given to what was really involved. A technique such as marketing research, a new forecasting method, or discounted cash flow can be applied to a company at will in as large or small a dose as...