Environmental forecasting and non-profit professional organizations

To undertake any kind of realistic planning activity, it is useful to have a long-term environmental forecast which provides the planner with an overall perspective. The planner will be functioning over the next decade in a very dynamic, complex and challenging political, economic, technological and social environment, and will require very effective planning efforts to cope with such changing environment. This article presents an approach and methodology that a planner could use in his/her organization's planning process. To the best of our knowledge, very few organizations—profit and non-profit oriented—undertake a formal long-term environmental forecast. This article might encourage several planners to examine this area of long range planning in their respective organizations. The long- term environmental forecasting approach presented in this article could be applied by planners in all types of organizations—small or large, profit oriented or non-profit oriented, old or new. This article, however, is based on a study which the authors did for a non-profit organization.     

What kind of corporate planner do you need?

The planning literature ignores distinctions among types of plans and types of planners. Consequently, a systematic pairing of planners and a company's level of planning need is not well understood or implemented in practice. This paper provides two missing links in order to bridge this shortfall between theory and practice. One is a planning matrix which establishes six possible planning modes for a company based on its stage of development and management style. The second is a distinction between three types of planners who would be appropriate to each planning mode. The matrix plus the three categories of planners provides a new tool for management in its responsibility for planning the job of the corporate planner. In doing so, it also surfaces some underlying causes of organizational strain and stress associated with the corporate planner's position.     

Politics,government and company planning: The new perspective

This paper looks at the developing scene in the U.K., with gloom at home and turmoil overseas: and with a new government committed to non-intervention in industry; to exposure of labour and of products to market forces and to avoidance of detailed economic planning. It examines the reality of party stances over the general field of government/industry relations and over cuts in public expenditure in both central and local government.Finally it examines the role of the professional planner at times of maximum uncertainty: and concludes that given a clear mind and a cool head the planner may be a unique stabilising influence at the heart of the company's affairs.     

Corporate planning in local government—a case study

The authors set out their view of the peculiar problems facing corporate planners in local government as compared with the private sector and their view of the nature of corporate planning in this special environment. By way of illustration as to how one local authority has attempted to introduce corporate planning, the article includes a case study of the City of Bradford Metropolitan Council.     

Town planning in Sweden: National officials versus local politicians

With strong central government traditions, Sweden has developed goal-oriented normative planning. At urban level, such planning raises many problems. This article discusses some of these problems from the three principal aspects of planning, namely the ideological, methodological and organizational aspect. The study is based on an extensive questionnaire and oral interviews among municipal planners in leadership positions in three middle-sized municipalities, namely Borås, Umeå and Västerås. The ideological aspect is discussed with reference to restrictions on urban planning arising as a result of decisions made by private enterprises and due to the interaction between the central and municipal government. The article goes on to describe the methods planners have developed to plan for land-use, resource allocation, housing and other sectoral activities and major defects in the planning system. Finally, the article discusses various problems faced by the municipal government whose departmental organization facilitates the administration of community services but cannot adequately deal with the increasing number of planning functions which are often interdepartmental in nature.     

Long range planning in large United States banks

This study indicated that there is considerable interest in formal strategic long range corporate planning among large U.S. banks. Officers in a total of 97 large U.S. banks provided information on their bank's efforts in the area of long range planning for this study. The data indicated that the percentage of large U.S. banks with fully developed and operational long range planning systems is rapidly increasing. Information on the organization for long range bank planning and the administrative procedures being utilized are presented and discussed. In addition, information on problems that the bankers are experiencing in implementing and operating their long range planning systems are presented.     

A POLITICAL ECONOMY THEORY OF FISCAL POLICY AND UNEMPLOYMENT

This paper presents a political economy theory of fiscal policy and unemployment. The underlying economy is one in which unemployment can arise but can be mitigated by tax cuts and increases in public production. Such policies are fiscally costly, but can be financed by issuing government debt. Policy decisions are made by a legislature consisting of representatives from different political districts. With the available policies, it is possible for the government to completely eliminate unemployment in the long run. However, with political decision making, the economy always has unemployment. Unemployment is higher when the private sector experiences negative shocks. When these shocks occur, the government employs debt‐financed fiscal stimulus plans which involve both tax cuts and public production increases. When the private sector is healthy, the government contracts debt until it reaches a floor level. Unemployment levels are weakly increasing in the economy's debt level, strictly so when the private sector experiences negative shocks. Conditional on the level of workers employed, the mix of public and private output is distorted.     

Organizational implications for long range planning

Much long range planning has ignored the need to change the firm's organization as its environment changes. Research demonstrates that those organizations which are effective have structures and behaviour which are congruent with their environments. To ensure that organizations can cope and adapt to future changes in environmental conditions long range planners need to take into consideration the appropriate development of both the organization and its members. This needs a multi-disciplinary approach in which behavioural scientists can play an important role. The Chemical Allied Products Industry Training Board has been developing a technology for examining organizations which could assist long range planners and managers to develop the organization and its members to suit the needs of future environmental change. This article discusses the many implications of these points.     

Corporate planning as a control system in United Kingdom nationalized industries

Since the late 1960s some U.K. nationalized industries have undertaken corporate planning as a means of exercising control. In the early 1970s, the U.K. Government, on the advice of one of its select committees, required that all U.K. nationalized industries undertake corporate planning. This requirement has been reinforced through a White Paper in 1978, in which the government reiterated that it saw corporate planning as a major instrument of control both for the nationalized industries themselves, and also for government in its relationships with the industries.This paper examines the development of corporate planning in nationalized industries. The findings are based on research carried out since 1976 in which discussions have taken place with corporate planners in most of the major U.K. nationalized industries. The method followed was to send planners a structured questionnaire covering the field of enquiry, and to follow this by an interview (or interviews) at a high level which would allow further discussion, particularly on the issues seen as important to the organization. The questionnaire was subsequently completed in consultation with the people concerned.     

Marketing planning in a service economy

This article discusses the need for effective planning of the vital services which support modern industrial economies. The influence of the public sector on private industry has grown substantially over the past decade. Government intervention in industry is no longer unique; the public sector and the private sector are in tandem and corporate planners in both areas should establish and develop a fruitful dialogue.     

Strategies for planning

In recent years there has been a good deal of discussion amongst planning specialists and academics about the gap which exists between the theory of planning as set out in journals and textbooks, and the practice of planning in private and public organizations. Planners are continually complaining about the resistance to planning by top management and operating managers in divisions and departments.In this article the author aims to produce a reconciliation between theory and practice and to discuss what alternative strategies are open to planners in devising planning systems for their organizations.He suggests that the problem has its origin in the fact that corporate planning theory was first developed by management scientists as a total systems approach. Corporate planners have failed to sell an integrated planning system either as programme budgeting or as corporate planning. Research suggests that a management team can only adopt and implement a comprehensive planning system in very special circumstances, e.g. when the organization's survival is threatened, a new management team has been appointed and the staff of the organization are ready to accept radical change.In normal circumstances the planner is wrong to advocate a ‘root and branch’ solution. He must diagnose the planning needs of the organization and his objective must be not merely to establish a particular planning procedure but rather to discover how he can best improve the quality of management decisions.Recent studies on strategy formation indicate that the introduction of a formal planning procedure is only a partial answer to the problem of improving the quality of management decisions.The paper reviews various approaches to planning and considers how they relate to organizations with different strategic problems, with differing organization structures and various management styles.     

The future of the stock exchange

What is the future of the Stock Exchange? In this article the author considers the question from the point of view of the U.K. His analysis will be of interest to planners in many types of organization. He concludes that provided the British economy remains one where private enterprises, funded by private savings voluntarily dispersed, the Stock Exchange will have a central part to play. At the same time, as the business of securities trading becomes more and more international so will the business of the Stock Exchange.     

Developing planning models

Mr. Holloway joined the Gulf Oil Corporation in 1939. His previous publications are in the fields of chemical engineering, statistics and computing.He is now the Senior Adviser on Planning Systems and member of Gulf's European Planning Council.The paper presents the author's view that linear programming is an efficient vehicle for long range planning, that it is more comprehensive and when properly structured requires no more computer time than the perhaps more conventional simulation models.Further, that it has the great advantage that the planner himself can control not only the data content of his model, but can also control the way in which the data is treated within the model even to the extent of making drastic matrix changes.     

The dangers of centralized economic planning

There is little evidence that there is much value in riveting attention on the question of strategic planning in an era of low growth or negative growth. Rather, there is value in discussing strategic planning in terms of the efficient realization of society's goals— whether expressed as economic goals or as non-economic aspirations. This article contains some observations on corporate strategic planning, provides perspective on the energy and materials scarcity question, and warns that detailed economic planning by government thwarts the optimal use of resources to improve living conditions for everyone. The author holds that renewed government reliance upon the workings of a competitive market economy is indispensable for achieving this goal.     

Planning for a professional association

Strategic planning for non-profit organizations presents special problems, both in concept and in application. The problems are particularly acute when the organization is a voluntary one, with highly heterogenous membership. This paper describes a multi-year effort to develop a member-needs based strategic long-range planning system for National Association of Realtors in the U.S.—a complex organization of 700,000 members, which combines the traditional functions of a trade association, an educational system, and of several professional societies. Problems, approach, and special techniques are described and discussed, with implications for senior managers and planners in both the public and private sector.     

How corporate planning responds to uncertainty

This article is based upon an SSRC research project into the influence of computer methods on decision making. During this research, information on the planning systems of a cross-section of British industry was obtained.The paper illustrates how managers in these firms were coping with planning in the present conditions of extreme uncertainty about the future, combined with adverse economic and business conditions. Conventional planning theory, together with some modern observations on it, are briefly described and then the paper shows how, in the firms visited, the structure of planning was more complex than this theory.It goes on to show that today's critical conditions were not leading to management putting aside their plans and computer models and “muddling through’. They were actually leading to an acceleration in the adoption of formal planning and decision making methods but in a somewhat different manner to conventional planning theory.Seven different modes of planning were identified with integrated operational planning being the most common, possibly the most essential to survival and sometimes the only planning possible into today's conditions. A trend to extend the operational plan to 2 to 3 years and to reduce the firm's long range plan from 5 to 3 years was also observed.Long range plans were being considered as planning and decision making tools and not as blue-prints of the firm's future, as accurate long range forecasting was impossible. Three types of strategic planning were identified with that carried out at intervals probably being the most appropriate for medium sized firms in today's conditions.     

Long range planning in large United States Corporations—A survey

This paper presents the results of a survey of the application of strategic and corporate planning in 500 large U.S. Corporations. The authors sought to update and provide new understanding on a number of important issues including; the extent of long range planning in these firms, the organizational structure of their planning function, the prevailing attitude towards long range planning in the firm, the planning process in terms of content and revision frequency, and the perceived benefits and problems associated with long range planning. In concentrating upon these issues the authors provide an interesting and important insight into the current application of strategic and corporate planning processes as well as giving a number of indications as to where the theory lags behind the practice.     

Strategic planning in an age of uncertainty

Strategic planning and decision making in the face of uncertainty have always presented a serious challenge to top management, but the present scale of uncertainty is unprecedented. Decision makers used to be able to rely on the past to predict the trends of the future. Now they are increasingly being forced to make important decisions that depend upon highly uncertain external factors for which the past offers little guidance. In all areas of business and government, there is a vital need to understand and implement procedures that enable decision makers to deal more effectively with uncertainty for planning and allocating their organizations' resources.Because of differences in their social, political and economic environments, European and Japanese managers are today affected by many acute areas of uncertainty— such as industrial democracy, floating exchange rates, changing social and political values, growing environmental awareness, government regulation, technological change, pollution control regulation, energy cost, and raw material availability—earlier than their counterparts in the U.S.A. These uncertainties affect not only private sector manufacturing industries, but also financial and service industries as well as nationalized industries and government organizations.This article shows how ineffective methods of dealing with uncertainty can lead to serious mistakes with costly consequences. The cost of overconfidence and people's natural but futile tendency to ignore or to try to eliminate uncertainty is illustrated by the crises seen recently in the world steel and shipbuilding industries. The article then demonstrates how decision analysis procedures that focus directly on the major decision points in the strategic plan enable executives not only to include uncertainty directly in their strategic planning, but also to increase their understanding of the decision process and their ability to communicate the results to others.     

The use of scenarios in corporate planning—eight case histories

In response to an increasingly turbulent environment, many firms are attempting to develop means to assess proposed strategies in the light of plausible alternative futures. Probably the most widely adopted technique for this purpose is multiple scenario analysis (MSA). The extent of MSA adoption among corporations varies considerably depending upon respective planning experience and top management's involvement and interest in MSA itself. The gamut of MSA adoption is examined among eight representative large U.S. corporations. It is clear that, while corporate interest is high, current formal scenario generating methodology is too complex or academic for practical corporate use. Instead, planners are using their own informal approaches to scenario generation.     

National planning in the United States

This paper is concerned with the relatively new interest in national planning in the United States. The effects of the Arab oil embargo and price increases, impending scarcities of minerals, inflation, unemployment, and other problems seem to be reversing the American public's negative views of planning by the Federal government. Assuming that negative sentiments are still strong and aware of the difficulty of institutional change, the authors submit a modest proposal for initiating a formal system of indicative national planning.The proposal is based upon an analysis of the economic challenges facing the United States and the apparent inability of the Federal government to respond effectively to change. The solution is seen as the need for an economic intelligence activity coupled to the formulation of ‘inventories of policy alternatives’, with a minimum of structural change or expansion in governmental structure.The recent Humphrey-Javits proposal for national planning is discussed briefly and critically.