Benefits, limitations, and potential pitfalls or challenges related to strategic planning
Numerous organizations, including those that claim not to employ strategic planning initiatives in their operations deploy their tools in varying extents. Scholarly research indicates that companies that employ strategic planning concepts have higher possibilities of success in terms of profitability than those that do not (Glover, 2004, p.17). Companies, which perform substantially well, thus tend to engage in systematic planning in an attempt to ensure their preparedness for any future fluctuations in the internal and external environments (Glover, 2004, p.17).
Organizations that deploy systems of planning similar to strategic planning generally possess immense performance in terms of finance in the long-term. Apart from financial benefits, strategic planning creates tangible benefits among them being external threats awareness, improved and cute competitor’s strengths awareness, reduction in change reluctance and improvement of productivity of the employees amongst others. Also, strategic planning enables a firm to, not only to identify its priorities but also to view management objectively and thus facilitating the exploitation of opportunities within an organization.
On the other hand, strategic planning possesses pitfalls or several challenges. Strategic planning encompasses a complex and intricate process with no immediate predetermined positive results since it takes a company into an exploration of an uncharted business territory. Strategic planning impairs the power devoted to the management to make organizational decisions. As a result, the question of the commitment of the top supervision on it emerges since the power to make subtle conclusions experiences a swing from the administrators to participants. “Strategic planning might inhibit changes and discourage the organization from considering disruptive alternatives since it might inhibit creativity, and does not easily handle truly creative ideas” (Mintzberg, 1994, p. 178).
In case of misuse, the strategic planning strategies maybe serve as means of acquiring “the control of decisions concerning the future, present, management, markets, employees and customers” (Glover, 2004, p.19). In the realm of public relations, people might employ it as a means for merely instilling foreigners who are prominent to the organization perhaps ensuring compliance with some specific demands for instance necessities of endorsement. “Strategic planning dismisses intuition and favors readily available, interpretable ‘hard’ data” (Mintzberg, 1994, p.191). It assumes that goals are “reconcilable in a single statement of objectives” (Mintzberg, 1994, p. 193). Through escalated conflicts in an organization, a political divide can be created due to political partisans amongst sweepstakes of an organization: fuelled by strategic planning tools.
Potential impact of globalization on the strategic planning process of organizations and collaboration, cooperation, and coordination
In the 17th century, Hudson Bay became one of the first companies to send traders into the global world. The management protocols that were established then aiming at the management of globally distributed workforce, left enormous impacts that people feel even today. Maintaining constant communication entangles one of the crucial elements in the strategic planning of an organization with a network of organs across the globe. Collaboration, cooperation, and coordination of the business strategies of all individual organizations units operating in different places across the world are crucial. This is largely possible due to globalization.
Collaborative opportunities fostered by globalization enhance strategic management initiatives for different firms thus capturing the elements of cultural connectedness. Share Point is perhaps one of the good examples of Web Browsing companies, which benefit significantly from the global technology that “…support the much-needed adherence to common digital standards” (Novitski, 2008, p.83). However, there is a need for a balance when it comes to advocating for international strategic planning initiatives.
In this regard, Korukonda (2006) argues that “…large scale integration of economies, a natural consequence of today’s world, injects a sudden shock of complexity into the environments of individual countries requiring drastic structural responses by way of providing the necessary infrastructure for information and coordination” (p.24). Globalization has a mega impact in ensuring the promotion of the creation of value by strategic plans: the concern of organizational cooperation strategy (Asghar, 2011, p.1123). Such as an impact is vital since cooperation hardly takes place in a complex system: what the majority of the organizations globally are today. However, globalization comes in to simplify the magnitude of complexity by promoting the restructuring of organizations.
Reference List
Asghar, Z. (2011). New Approach to Strategic Planning: the Impact of Leadership and Culture on Plan Implantation via the three Cs: Cooperation, Collaboration, and Coordination. Proceedings of ASBBS, 18(1), pp. 1121-1132.
Korukonda, A. (2006). Globalization, social development, and operations research: An exploration of strategies for success. Annals of Operations Research, 143(1), pp. 21–30.
Novitski, B. (2008). Managing the Ever More Distributed Work Force. Architectural Record, 196(11), p. 83.
Glover, S. (2004). Update on strategic planning. CA Magazine, 137(4), pp. 17–18.
Mintzberg, H. (1994). The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. New York, NY: The Free Press.