Strategic Planning at the Crossroads |
The economic stress of the past two years has thrown
companies’ planning processes into turmoil, sharply
reducing the effectiveness of their performance
management programs. Revitalizing planning requires
mastery of these three key capabilities.
It’s the planning process — the ability to
incorporate real-time adjustments based on external
factors — that matters, not a static, written document
that often becomes obsolete shortly after it’s approved.
Since the financial crisis and prolonged downturn that
began in 2008, many companies have discovered this the
hard way. Plans that were developed in the course of a
schedule-driven annual exercise, based on historic
performance and flawed economic assumptions, proved to
be worse than useless. Companies not only failed to
prepare themselves for changes in the market, but also
misled their investors and created an atmosphere of
skepticism and doubt.
2011 |