Management

11
Strategic Planning:
The Entrepreneurial Skill
Practically every basic management decision is a long-range decision—ten years is
a rather short time span these days. Whether concerned with research or with
building a new plant, designing a new marketing organization or a new product,
every major management decision takes years before it is really effective. And it
has to be productive for years thereafter to pay off the investment of people and
money. Managers, therefore, need to be skilled in making decisions with long futurity
on a systematic basis.
Management has no choice but to anticipate the future, to attempt to mold it,
and to balance short-range and long-range goals. It is not given to mortals to do
well any of these things. But lacking divine guidance, management must make
sure that these difficult responsibilities are not overlooked or neglected.
The idea of long-range planning—and much of its reality—rests on a number
of misunderstandings. The present and the immediate short range require strategic
decisions fully as much as the long range. The long range is largely made by
short-run decisions. Unless the long range is built into, and based on, short-range
plans and decisions, the most elaborate long-range plan will be an exercise in futility.
And conversely, unless the short-range plans, that is, the decisions on the here
and now, are integrated into one unified plan of action, they will be expedients,
guesses, and misdirection.
“Short range” and “long range” are not determined by any given time span. A
decision is not short range because it takes only a few months to carry it out. What
matters is the time span over which it has to be effective. A decision is not long
range because in early 2008 we resolve on making it in 2012; this is not a decision
but an idle diversion. It has as much reality as the eight-year-old boy’s plan to be a
fireman when he grows up.
The idea behind long-range planning is that the question, “What should our
business be?” can and should be worked on and decided by itself, independent of
the thinking on “What is our business” and “What will it be?” There is some